The Picaresque And Pretense of Evil
Today's movie double is about the 'bad guy as hero'. The broad genre convention of picaresques is that the main character be something of a charmer but somehow lacking in moral fortitude. The classic definition involves the satirical content as well as the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society.
It seems interesting to compare Johnny Depp in his fourth outing as Captain Jack Sparrow is solidly set in his piratical ways, while 50cent tries to extend his rap singer persona out as a rookie cop turned bad cop 'Malo'. The Picaresque might be making a comeback in these uncertain times.
A World Of Crooks
The civilised parts of the world in 'Pirates of the Caribbean' are always so full of stuffy nasty poncy Englishmen who seem either captive servitors of a rather nasty system, or servile, willing collaborators for the rich and nasty types. The promise of freedom is offered up by the pirates and their way of life. By this, the fourth installation, it seems like a ritual that somebody attempts to hang Jack Sparrow which leads to a dating escape. Somehow these sequences get more elaborate and silly as the films go on.
Similarly in 'Freelancers', the world of New York City police force life for rookie cop 'Malo' seems to be a foregone conclusion of corruption and mayhem. The senior police represented in this little segment of the world seem to be all heavily compromised in their ethical stances. Led by Robert De Niro's Joe Sarcone (whose main purpose seems to be to lend weight to this trifling film with his actorly baggage of good films), the senior cops provide bad examples for the newly minted rookie cops.
Both these films paint bleak portraits of society, although it has to be said the Pirate movies are not serious at all about its portrayal of class in England. Meanwhile, 'Freelancers' seems to want to make the serious point that every second cop in New York City is crooked, mostly by necessity of the socius. It's a difficult claim to take seriously, but, because 50cent has a public persona to maintain, this is what we get.
Whereas the Pirate movie offers us moments of genuine delight and abrasive satire at the pomp of the British Royal family, 'Freelancers' wants us to take the social commentary very seriously. Now, it might be the case that the police in New York City are corrupt, but this movie portrays the rookie cops like idiots and babes in the woods, ready to be corrupted by the older hands.
The flipside of this is that they're all portrayals of a certain kind of Americana. Jack Sparrow exists defiant and opposite to the British class system, which informs the kind of gun-toting second-amendment-loving diatribe that falls out of the the birth of the USA. You could read the supernatural story of Jack Sparrow as kind of metaphorical birth of America. Meanwhile, 'Freelancers' paints a picture of where America is today and the irony is that the society portrayed by the latter film is just as bad as the society that tries to hang Jack Sparrow every episode.
The Anti-Establishment Credentials
It makes me laugh to read that in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, the NRA thinks Hollywood films and violent video games and music videos have to shoulder some blame. If ever there was an entity that basically provokes this irrational fear of edgy entertainment, it is a rap star like 50 Cent.
It goes without saying that 50 Cent and his persona cannot relinquish the street, so the film ends up being a tortured revenge story where the main character is hardly heroic; he's more a vagabond in a cop uniform, ready to go on the take faster than you can say "fifty cents". If this willful distortion of 'values' doesn't grind people's gears and their sense of society, then surely the film needs some kind of ballast and that seems to be what Robert De Niro and Forest Whitaker provide. Combined, the film has an all-over-the-shop sort of mimesis that simply has not existed before, where the audience is rooting for a bad cop played by a gangsta-rapper.
Forget the ubiquity of drugs and the tortured discourse about the 'n-word', the film staggers along what can only be described as the social sewers of New York, all the while people are snorting and fucking and snorting while fucking. For me, it's kind of a dystopia, but this film is pitched for somebody - I feel sorry for that somebody. As picaresques go, this one makes you wonder if western civilisation has reached a saturation point in decadence.
The Fountain Of Youth As Arbitrary Symbol
One of the most peculiar concerns in 'Pirates IV' is that the characters are in search of the fountain of youth, while the main character seems rather oblique to these passions. It's not clear that Jack Sparrow wants to get there, let alone take part in the required ritual at the end of the journey. It seems incredibly disingenuous even, that Jack Sparrow would not be interested in the fountain of youth if such a thing existed - and this being a movie, of course it exists.
His sometime nemesis and other-time partner in crime Hector Barbossa is equally disinterested in the fountain. He's after revenge against Blackbeard, so it is purely coincidental that the fountain of youth is involved in the story. For all he cares he would have his revenge on the streets of London or a pub somewhere. The character who has the clear motivation of getting to the fountain then is the villain Blackbeard except it is not even clear he believes in the necessity. On some level he seems to be resigned to his fate of being killed by the one-legged man. He's only going because he's being goaded into it by his daughter.
This explains the title in a roundabout way, why it might not be 'Fountain of Youth' but 'On Stranger Tides'. The film's main characters are actually oddly blase about getting to the destination.
Do They Learn Anything?
Picaresques in general are narratives to highlight and satirise the societies in which they are set . That being said, it is hard to see if the main characters in these stories really learn anything. Even Jack Sparrow seems largely unchanged by any and all the adventures he has found himself. The inability to change is probably due to the fact that the authorial voice is usually couched through the incredulity or passive-aggressive compliance of the main characters. Thus Jack Sparrow seemingly eludes any emotional change as readily he eludes his captors in the big chase show pieces, right across 4 films.
In 'Freelancers', it is clear that 'Malo' learns something about his father and therefore his own identity. Whether what he learns contributes anything positive is rather questionable, as even the ending shows that Malo might be much happier operating on the wrong side of the law than the right one.
Malo finds out that his father was a crooked cop on the take. His father died when he tried to turn states evidence, and Joe Sarcone found out and killed him. When Malo grows up to be a cop, the first thing Joe Sarcone does is recruit Malo. This is a mystery given the prior history - the man ought to fear revenge, but there is no such sign of consternation. Malo, gets with the crooked cop routine like fish to water. this to is mysterious. it doesn't seem to occur to Malo to walk the straight and narrow. Instead his own solution is to betray Joe, set him up for a hit, while also tipping off the DEA (which, in the scheme of things makes no sense).
So Malo too expresses the authorial voice's - probably 50cent's own - need to castigate New York City, but at the same time he is entirely complicit in the bullshit. It might dress itself up as some kind of social critique but it's pretty piss poor in quality when it is too easy on itself.
Schtick As Acting, Acting As Schtick
I've pointed out before how, the more something veers toward comedy, the layers of acting increase. So we know that 'Stranger Tides' is firmly a comedy early on when we are presented with Jack Sparrow pretending to be a judge and Penelope Cruz's Angelica pretending to be Jack Sparrow and Hector Barbossa pretending to be a respectable privateer for His Majesty. Geoffrey Rush's turn as Hector Barbossa seems to grow more arch and convoluted with each outing. This time he is missing a leg but he uses his stump peg leg as a flask.
I've been told this kind of acting is over-acting and in bad taste but alas a) I have a taste for bad comedy and find it hard to throw away and b) I have a strong distaste for realism as a benchmark. Especially in a flipping weird series of films as the Pirates of Caribbean, where at some point a ship is rolled across the desert on rocks or eyeballs or whatever. Realism that, fellas.
In Hollywood fare, it's immensely difficult to see the acting for the stars, and the star system banks on the fact that you don't see the acting - that you only see the schtick.Tom Cruise's entire career has been built on this premise. In this day and age, do you really get to see Robert De Niro *act*, or do you get to see Robert De Niro trot out his schtick? Lately I'm inclined to think it's the latter, the longer the career goes. Is he phoning it in? Probably. But I imagine I would have ended up watching 'Freelancers' any way, even if Joe Sarcone had been played by... Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Paul Sorvino, Danny Aiello, or even Danny DeVito. It might have been even better had it been Danny DeVito. I don't know what to make of Forest Whitaker and Robert De Niro's turn in 'Freelancers'; Even accounting for them phoning it in, it's a pretty ordinary effort. Especially the scene where both of them order Malo to snort not one but two lines of cocaine. I found myself thinking "this is too fucking stupid for words." Except at some point somebody wrote the script with those very words. The God of Filmmaking is not only blind, he's illiterate as well. 50 Cent's acting is pretty ordinary, even allowing for my lax tastes. I can handle ham, I can handle cheese, or for that matter ham with cheese. I just can't handle crap, and this is crap.
What Frightens Me
Hollywood is hard up for ideas. That's why Pirates of the Caribbean is on to it's Fourth film and maybe there's even going to be yet another sequel. it's a money making machine, born out of a theme park ride and mostly devoid of any ambition in its narrative stakes. 'Freelancers' is some kind of garbled street cred movie from a rap star. It's clear they're hard up for good ideas and they've lost the balls for doing anything daring.
Given the parlous state of Hollywood, what frightens me is that 'Freelancers' will have a sequel.
A Gen-X View of the Universe.
"The Issue Isn't Pussy, It's Monkey" - from The Right Stuff
Film, Cinema, Movies, TV, Music, Rock
2012/12/29
Contrasting Styles
Reforms, The Chinese Way
Here's an article about China needing reforms and here's an article about India needing reforms. It's interesting that they come up on the same day in the same way with similar problems.
China first.
There's a list of challenges this year for China, but basically there's no guessing how this reform will be accomplished. The leadership and its processes are opaque to the point of obscure. Nobody knows how they will deal with tough issues that involve vested interests. It's actually a deep mystery how they prioritise their issues.
This is in stark contrast to India:
There's a democratically elected leader pointing to the problems with no veiled language that needs to be dissected and decoded. The article then goes on to a discussion about the need for a Goods and Services Tax.
I offer this up as interesting because with China you have an oligarchic state that will do what's required from the top down without any insight into the debate while with India you have a state that spells out what needs to be done but must build a difficult consensus in order to get those things done.
If I were an investor, I'd be challenged by what is on offer here. On the one hand it's high growth, multiple and high political risks with China, and relatively lower growth with comparatively lower political risk with India. Not to lowball China's accomplishments so far, but the lack of transparency in China just scares the hell out of me. Equally, tales of vast inefficiencies, and red tape in India would brown me off from putting money there in a hurry.
Here's an article about China needing reforms and here's an article about India needing reforms. It's interesting that they come up on the same day in the same way with similar problems.
China first.
Chinese officials did little to dispel some of the more extreme rumours, including that he was seriously ill, or that he was hit in the back with a chair hurled during a meeting that turned violent with a fellow ''princeling'' - a term used to describe the close-knit network of sons and daughters of revolutionary heroes increasingly gaining influence and political capital in China. Again, no explanation was proffered.
China's standing in the world now, combined with the lack of regular access to senior politicians, has meant the increasing horde of China-watchers tend to hang off every public utterance from the likes of Xi, trying to read between the lines, squinting for subtle messages in what is invariably tightly scripted party-speak.
Just this month, Xi's visit to Shenzhen, in China's south, drew close attention from state and international media. Shenzhen was a stop on Deng Xiaoping's landmark southern tour in 1992 - the genesis of the catchcry ''to get rich is glorious'' - and where he canvassed support for his platform of economic reform.
There's a list of challenges this year for China, but basically there's no guessing how this reform will be accomplished. The leadership and its processes are opaque to the point of obscure. Nobody knows how they will deal with tough issues that involve vested interests. It's actually a deep mystery how they prioritise their issues.
This is in stark contrast to India:
''The current economic situation is difficult. The continuing crisis in the global economy … combined with some domestic constraints, has meant that our growth has also slowed down,'' Dr Singh told the National Development Council, India's major economic planning body that includes the leaders of all 28 states.
''Our first priority must be to reverse this slowdown. We cannot change the global economy, but we can do something about the domestic constraints which have contributed to the downturn.''
Dr Singh said the world's largest democracy needed major economic reforms, and rapidly, to lift its poorest citizens from poverty.
An estimated 400 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day.
''We must remember that we are still a low-income country. We need 20 years of rapid growth to bring it to middle-income level. The journey is long and requires hard work.''
India's growth rate for the fiscal year ending in March is expected to be 5.7 to 5.9 per cent, the slowest since 2002-03.
There's a democratically elected leader pointing to the problems with no veiled language that needs to be dissected and decoded. The article then goes on to a discussion about the need for a Goods and Services Tax.
I offer this up as interesting because with China you have an oligarchic state that will do what's required from the top down without any insight into the debate while with India you have a state that spells out what needs to be done but must build a difficult consensus in order to get those things done.
If I were an investor, I'd be challenged by what is on offer here. On the one hand it's high growth, multiple and high political risks with China, and relatively lower growth with comparatively lower political risk with India. Not to lowball China's accomplishments so far, but the lack of transparency in China just scares the hell out of me. Equally, tales of vast inefficiencies, and red tape in India would brown me off from putting money there in a hurry.
2012/12/23
Harmon Kardon Sound Stick III
Plastic Can Sound This Good?
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="665"]
Harmon Kardon Sound Stick III[/caption]
For Christmas, my better half bought a Harmon Kardon Sound Stick III system for me to use in the kitchen. The original idea was to get a Boom Box so I could just plug in the iPod, but a bit of shopping around and auditioning led us to this contraption which has been around in one version or another for a good decade, but the current version really sparkled.
Truth be known, I was mean to most of the Boom Boxes and powered speakers on display in JB Hi-Fi - I ran original instrument violins and cellos sawing their way through J.S. Bach, which is not the kind of music those things are generally designed for. All the same, the Sound Stick IIIs were able to give a sense of timbre beyond the squeaky 'squeeeeeee' of the original instruments and the shop demo doof music seemed to have some kind of shape. it wasn't much to go on, but it was a loud shop at Christmas Shopping time.
Even then you could hear this thing was head and shoulders above anything in its price range, let alone stuff for which they were asking twice the money. It was the only system where the strings sounded like strings and harpsichord sounded like harpsichord, and Glenn Gould moans sounded like Glenn Gould moans. The dude in the shop wasn't particularly impressed I was pumping piano music loud just so I could hear Glenn Gould moan, but ... you get that. Soon enough, we decided this one would do.
Once I got home and ran some full-blooded rock and full-hearted jazz through these things, the sound scape just expanded and filled the space like some bit of proper hi-fi equipment. And I found myself staring at the marvelous plastic object, honestly wondering from where in the good name of the lord, this sound was being summoned, because the clear bits of plastic just don't look like they should be doing this well.
When you look at it closely you can see the sticks are in fact little baffled speakers in their own right, while the main sub unit is like an alien dome with its own baffle design. The design itself has been around for a few years now and it's allegedly in the New York Museum of Modern Art for its design, which tells you it ticks the Modernist chic box nice and well. I remember seeing the original ones thinking, "oh, yeah, that looks interesting... but all that plastic?" I've got a lot of prejudice about materials that way - But the marvel is when you run a bit of King Crimson or Herbie Hancock or even the remastered Sgt. Peppers through it from the iPod. Yes, the damn iPod Classic running 192kbps AAC files. Plastic? You can not hear the plastic. Honestly, this thing has got me baffled with how well it works.
A clear plastic thing hurling out monster sound. Go figure that one out.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="665"]
Harmon Kardon Sound Stick III[/caption]For Christmas, my better half bought a Harmon Kardon Sound Stick III system for me to use in the kitchen. The original idea was to get a Boom Box so I could just plug in the iPod, but a bit of shopping around and auditioning led us to this contraption which has been around in one version or another for a good decade, but the current version really sparkled.
Truth be known, I was mean to most of the Boom Boxes and powered speakers on display in JB Hi-Fi - I ran original instrument violins and cellos sawing their way through J.S. Bach, which is not the kind of music those things are generally designed for. All the same, the Sound Stick IIIs were able to give a sense of timbre beyond the squeaky 'squeeeeeee' of the original instruments and the shop demo doof music seemed to have some kind of shape. it wasn't much to go on, but it was a loud shop at Christmas Shopping time.
Even then you could hear this thing was head and shoulders above anything in its price range, let alone stuff for which they were asking twice the money. It was the only system where the strings sounded like strings and harpsichord sounded like harpsichord, and Glenn Gould moans sounded like Glenn Gould moans. The dude in the shop wasn't particularly impressed I was pumping piano music loud just so I could hear Glenn Gould moan, but ... you get that. Soon enough, we decided this one would do.
Once I got home and ran some full-blooded rock and full-hearted jazz through these things, the sound scape just expanded and filled the space like some bit of proper hi-fi equipment. And I found myself staring at the marvelous plastic object, honestly wondering from where in the good name of the lord, this sound was being summoned, because the clear bits of plastic just don't look like they should be doing this well.
When you look at it closely you can see the sticks are in fact little baffled speakers in their own right, while the main sub unit is like an alien dome with its own baffle design. The design itself has been around for a few years now and it's allegedly in the New York Museum of Modern Art for its design, which tells you it ticks the Modernist chic box nice and well. I remember seeing the original ones thinking, "oh, yeah, that looks interesting... but all that plastic?" I've got a lot of prejudice about materials that way - But the marvel is when you run a bit of King Crimson or Herbie Hancock or even the remastered Sgt. Peppers through it from the iPod. Yes, the damn iPod Classic running 192kbps AAC files. Plastic? You can not hear the plastic. Honestly, this thing has got me baffled with how well it works.
A clear plastic thing hurling out monster sound. Go figure that one out.
2012/12/19
News That's Fit To Punt - 18/Dec/2012
Shinzo Abe Wins In Japan
Predictably, the Democrats lost in Japan to the Liberal Democrats in the election on Sunday. now that the dust has cleared, there's a lot of talk about how this is a hard move to the right. The DPJ were not only kicked out, they were more decimated to about one sixth of representation. in the landslide, the 'Restoration Party' also picked up a bunch of seats in the lower house, putting them at about equal footing with the DPJ, while the Social democrats got smashed to two seats. The end for Prime Minster was more crash-and-burn than going out in style.
What's got my interest right now more than all this talk of Japan might be turning hard to the right is the notion that Shinzo Abe wants to challenge the Bank of Japan to do the kind of Quantitative Easing in the style of Ben Bernanke and the US Federal Reserve.
Which, when you think about it is pretty enticing. It's certainly a return to Keynsian economic thinking, and something I've been wondering for some years now. Japan was actually coming out of the lost decade around 2007 when the GFC kicked in, and since then, asset deflation has hit growth pretty hard. More to the point, if there's one nation that could have printed more money in the last 20years,it was Japan.
Now, there are reasons the Bank of Japan hasn't simply printed money, and this is because the property bubble came about because there was so much cash flying around the economy, looking for places to be invested; and under the old hyper regulated markets of Japan, inevitably found their way to real estate which led to the Bubble. Since then of course there's been a whole lot of deregulation. It may work better now that there has been all this deregulation that has happened since 1990.
This next bit also got my attention:
You can just see the successor to Shirakawa - whoever it's going to be - would want to put up a big fight with Abe. Now, I don't know about you, but it seems to me that if one sector in Japan has made lots of money since the Bubble, it's actually the banks. Banks everywhere seem to thrive a lot better when interest rates are lower, and the banks in Japan have been able to grow steadily in spite of the low growth economy for quite some years now. So, rocking the boat and printing money may actually be something the banks would like. The Bank of Japan claiming it's been holding off inflation seems to have been way off the mark for most of the time since the Bubble burst.
No More Of Tanaka In Niigata Ward 5
Daughter of former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, Makiko Tanaka lost her seat to Tadayoshi Nagashima of the LDP. The interesting thing about that is that it happened in Niigata where the name of Kakuei Tanaka brings awe (and graft money by the truckload). Some of you might know this but the man who deposed her is the former mayor of Yamakoshi village that suffered greatly from an Earthquake earlier in the decade, and led the recovery of that village for years.
I met Mr. Nagashima when he came out to Sydney for the Japanese Film Festival. He is a career politician in many ways, but he did it from the ground up. He's not one of those people who come from dynastic families of politicians, unlike Makiko Tanaka, who is the epitome of that problem. Whatever Makiko Tanaka might say, she lost to a man who knew the electorate and understood how to do elections there. Talk about an end of an era that dates back to the mid 1950s.
Good Riddance, I say.
Predictably, the Democrats lost in Japan to the Liberal Democrats in the election on Sunday. now that the dust has cleared, there's a lot of talk about how this is a hard move to the right. The DPJ were not only kicked out, they were more decimated to about one sixth of representation. in the landslide, the 'Restoration Party' also picked up a bunch of seats in the lower house, putting them at about equal footing with the DPJ, while the Social democrats got smashed to two seats. The end for Prime Minster was more crash-and-burn than going out in style.
What's got my interest right now more than all this talk of Japan might be turning hard to the right is the notion that Shinzo Abe wants to challenge the Bank of Japan to do the kind of Quantitative Easing in the style of Ben Bernanke and the US Federal Reserve.
Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a landslide victory on Sunday, securing a two-thirds "super-majority" in the Diet with allies that can override senate vetoes.
Armed with a crushing mandate, Mr Abe said he would "set a policy accord" with the Bank of Japan for a mandatory inflation target of 2 per cent, backed by "unlimited" monetary stimulus.
"It's very rare for monetary policy to be the focus of an election. We campaigned on the need to beat deflation, and our argument has won strong support. I hope the Bank of Japan accepts the results and takes an appropriate decision," he said.
The menace behind his words did not have to be spelled out. He has already threatened to change the Bank of Japan’s governing law if it refuses to comply.
"An all-out attack on deflation is on its way," said Jesper Koll, Japanese equity chief at JPMorgan.
Mr Abe plans to empower an economic council to "spearhead" a shift in fiscal and monetary strategy, eviscerating the central bank’s independence.
The council is to set a 3 per cent growth target for nominal GDP, embracing a theory pushed by a small band of "market monetarists" around the world.
Which, when you think about it is pretty enticing. It's certainly a return to Keynsian economic thinking, and something I've been wondering for some years now. Japan was actually coming out of the lost decade around 2007 when the GFC kicked in, and since then, asset deflation has hit growth pretty hard. More to the point, if there's one nation that could have printed more money in the last 20years,it was Japan.
Now, there are reasons the Bank of Japan hasn't simply printed money, and this is because the property bubble came about because there was so much cash flying around the economy, looking for places to be invested; and under the old hyper regulated markets of Japan, inevitably found their way to real estate which led to the Bubble. Since then of course there's been a whole lot of deregulation. It may work better now that there has been all this deregulation that has happened since 1990.
This next bit also got my attention:
"Any meaningful sell-off in the JGBs could trigger a serious problem in Japan’s banking system. The holdings of JGBs by Japanese banks account for 900pc of their Tier I capital," he said. Better the Devil you know.
Professor Richard Werner from Southampton University, author of Princes of the Yen, said the Bank of Japan is to blame for the country's failure to shake off its financial crisis in the early 1990s and for two Lost Decades of perma-slump that have followed. He accused the bank of dragging its feet at every stage, forcing governments to rely on huge fiscal deficits instead.
This tight-money/loose fiscal mix has pushed public debt to 240 per cent of GDP. The country would have been better served if the bank had stopped the rot immediately by flooding the money supply to kickstart lending. "It has taken 20 years and the Fed's Ben Bernanke to show them how to do it."
"Mr Abe has the right intentions but the Bank of Japan knows how to put up a fight. After watching the glacial moves in Japan for over 20 years - often in the wrong direction - I want to see the details before being sure that something really big is happening," he said.
You can just see the successor to Shirakawa - whoever it's going to be - would want to put up a big fight with Abe. Now, I don't know about you, but it seems to me that if one sector in Japan has made lots of money since the Bubble, it's actually the banks. Banks everywhere seem to thrive a lot better when interest rates are lower, and the banks in Japan have been able to grow steadily in spite of the low growth economy for quite some years now. So, rocking the boat and printing money may actually be something the banks would like. The Bank of Japan claiming it's been holding off inflation seems to have been way off the mark for most of the time since the Bubble burst.
No More Of Tanaka In Niigata Ward 5
Daughter of former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, Makiko Tanaka lost her seat to Tadayoshi Nagashima of the LDP. The interesting thing about that is that it happened in Niigata where the name of Kakuei Tanaka brings awe (and graft money by the truckload). Some of you might know this but the man who deposed her is the former mayor of Yamakoshi village that suffered greatly from an Earthquake earlier in the decade, and led the recovery of that village for years.
I met Mr. Nagashima when he came out to Sydney for the Japanese Film Festival. He is a career politician in many ways, but he did it from the ground up. He's not one of those people who come from dynastic families of politicians, unlike Makiko Tanaka, who is the epitome of that problem. Whatever Makiko Tanaka might say, she lost to a man who knew the electorate and understood how to do elections there. Talk about an end of an era that dates back to the mid 1950s.
Good Riddance, I say.
2012/12/15
News That's Fit To Punt - 14/Dec/2012
How Low Can You Go, Bro(ugh)?
We all want to know this, now that the Federal Court has thrown out James Ashby's case. What's interesting about the case is not only did judge Steven Rares throw out the case, he awarded costs against Ashby. Which is to say, the judge thinks Ashby has not just been a public nuisance but a malicious muck-raker unto Peter Slipper and now must make amends to the man.
This has led to ALP front benchers accusing the Coalition of being part of a conspiracy, and Julia Gillard has called for Mal Brough to front up to a press conference in Canberra. It's all a little too late for Peter Slipper himself, as Anna Burke will stay Speaker of the House. Mal Brough will stay the candidate for the LNP trying to unseat Peter Slipper, and the Coalition has been pretending that they had nothing to do with Ashby's case. the problem of course is that the first person to fail the Cui Bono test is Tony Abbott and the second person to fail is everybody else in the Federal Coalition.
In my books, you don't call this sort of thing a 'conspiracy'. It's called gaming the system, and it's exactly why the judge threw out the case - he did not wish the court to be made into the Coalition's play thing. I'm sure there will be retaliation from the Coalition once they get into power; and it has to be said, they will deny that it is revenge when they exact it upon the judge.
We'll all have to hold our noses so long we'll go blue and die.
Weasel Words
Julia Gillard has said Abbott has to stop using weasel words:
As Mr Abbott today denied there was a Coalition conspiracy, Ms Gillard said Mr Abbott had to stop using ''weasel'' words over the matter and disendorse the Liberal National Party candidacy of Mal Brough - who the Federal Court found worked with James Ashby to harm Mr Slipper.
Which is funny because the Conservatives delight in weasel words. It's their credo that the language they speak is not English but Weasel Words. Pointing this out doesn't even constitute an insult. it's like telling a leopard won't change his spots - of course not, not only is it impossible, he's proud of them. I just thought I'd mention that.
Bob Carr's Lucky Break
This week, Julian Assange has been making noises he will run for the Senate in earnest. This is interesting because I've also noticed that the person who has been the least helpful to Asange's cause might be the foreign minster of Australia himself, Bob Carr. Yes, he who used to be the Premier of NSW and jumped before he got found out for running a corrupt ship of fools. There he was languishing in retirement, doing power walks around the footpaths of Iron Cove, and voila, his lifelong dream of being a foreign Minster opens up because Mark Arbib had to fall on his sword.
I seem to recall Mark Arbib got named as a CIA informant in leaked documents - documents leaked via good old Wikileaks - and so he had to fall on that sword; Mark Arbib's senate seat never would have opened up had it not been for the good work Julian Assange did in exposing that RattusRattus. Bob Carr is a net beneficiary there of the chain of events.
Well, it occurred to me today that Bob Carr should be thanking Julian Assange for allowing his lifelong dream to come true, and that he should do a much better job of protecting Mr. Assange and bringing him home.
I know he won't see it that way - he's the master of non sequitur responses and would claim some arcane reason why he's not - but it seems obvious as daylight if you bother to read the newspapers. Oh I forgot, nobody does that anymore.
2012/12/08
Forgetting Romnesia?
Mr. Romney's Ready For His Close Up, Mr. Spielberg
Here's something interesting out at the Economist about how the republicans are scapegoating Mitt Romney after his defeat.
The 47% incident pretty much sums up Romney campaign at this point in history, now that it's all said and done. It was a colossal 'blunder' - or moment of frankness - because the Democrats were working pretty hard to paint Romney as a plutocrat, and he essentially served up his own credo to be put in stocks and be pelted.
This all got me to be thinking about the Obama Campaign's campaign director Jim Messina and how he drew from a wide range of sources for his plan. The most inttersting bit in is that he consulted none other than Steven Spielberg:
Obviously that bit stuck in my mind for months because it shows that in going for the jugular, they picked the mind of the man who was most attuned to putting an emotive message across, and the advice was decisive. When you consider the Republicans got Clint Eastwood to turn up at their convention to talk to a chair, you get the feeling that the Republicans were more than a little behind in how messages are put out to the public. The Democrats were making ads with Spielberg's input to get the nuance exactly right while the Republicans were essentially waving symbols around - "Look, we got Clint Eastwood who used to be Dirty Harry!". The level of abstraction and sophistication is so low it beggars belief.
It was certainly an interesting moment in history because the Democratic machine was coming at them with what can only be described as 'applied Marshall McLuhan Communication Theory' and the Republicans were essentially doing things that weren't far removed from semaphore and cave paintings. Even if you don't take into account the demographic shift going against the white establishment, you seriously wonder if the Republicans are going to be able to get their heads around this problem, because it's not just who you talk to, but it's how you talk to them and what you tell them in order to persuade them.
They can scapegoat Mitt Romney all they like, but it seems to me they had much deeper problems than Mitt Romney being a gaff-prone plutocrat.
Here's something interesting out at the Economist about how the republicans are scapegoating Mitt Romney after his defeat.
Yet fair or unfair, the trashing of Mr Romney should be welcomed, because it shows signs of reflection among those now vying to lead the party. Mr Romney faces two main charges. First, he allowed the Republicans to be seen as a party of the rich. Second, he seemed to scorn social mobility. Exhibit A for both charges is the moment when Mr Romney was secretly filmed at a dinner with donors asserting that 47% of Americans are Democratic voters “no matter what” because they are dependent on government largesse, pay no federal income tax and are thus deaf to arguments about low taxes or personal responsibility.
In recent days, a string of grandees have singled out those comments for attack. Mitch Daniels, the outgoing governor of Indiana, calls the 47% incident a “self-inflicted fatal blow”, compounded shortly after the election when Mr Romney blamed defeat on voters greedy for government “gifts”. Ted Cruz, a senator-elect from Texas, claims (rather implausibly) that the 47% comments—rather than Republican hostility to immigration—explain Mr Romney’s dire showing among Latinos. Mr Romney’s running-mate, Paul Ryan, has let it be known that he “seethed” about his boss’s blunder.
The 47% incident pretty much sums up Romney campaign at this point in history, now that it's all said and done. It was a colossal 'blunder' - or moment of frankness - because the Democrats were working pretty hard to paint Romney as a plutocrat, and he essentially served up his own credo to be put in stocks and be pelted.
This all got me to be thinking about the Obama Campaign's campaign director Jim Messina and how he drew from a wide range of sources for his plan. The most inttersting bit in is that he consulted none other than Steven Spielberg:
Messina spent time with filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who briefed him on what messages got the attention of audience, and reportedly had input into a advertisement against Mitt Romney that highlighted his time at Bain Capital, a private equity firm that he co-founded.
"Romney had run on this business record of, 'I'm a manager, I know how to turn things around'. And the Obama strategy over the summer was to turn that positive into a negative by running these ads in states like Ohio, talking about Romney's record at Bain Capital - outsourcing, jobs, laying off workers," Mr Freedman said.
While the negative ad was slammed and described as many commentators as unsuccessful, Mr Freedman said the campaign against the Republican challenger, who was at that time still pre-occupied with the primary, ultimately appeared to be effective in the swing states.
Obviously that bit stuck in my mind for months because it shows that in going for the jugular, they picked the mind of the man who was most attuned to putting an emotive message across, and the advice was decisive. When you consider the Republicans got Clint Eastwood to turn up at their convention to talk to a chair, you get the feeling that the Republicans were more than a little behind in how messages are put out to the public. The Democrats were making ads with Spielberg's input to get the nuance exactly right while the Republicans were essentially waving symbols around - "Look, we got Clint Eastwood who used to be Dirty Harry!". The level of abstraction and sophistication is so low it beggars belief.
It was certainly an interesting moment in history because the Democratic machine was coming at them with what can only be described as 'applied Marshall McLuhan Communication Theory' and the Republicans were essentially doing things that weren't far removed from semaphore and cave paintings. Even if you don't take into account the demographic shift going against the white establishment, you seriously wonder if the Republicans are going to be able to get their heads around this problem, because it's not just who you talk to, but it's how you talk to them and what you tell them in order to persuade them.
They can scapegoat Mitt Romney all they like, but it seems to me they had much deeper problems than Mitt Romney being a gaff-prone plutocrat.
Burning Down The (Movie) House
From Miserable Failure To Abject Failure
A heads-up from Pleiades gave me this wonderful view of how a company purporting to be a Film & TV production company soaked up millions in investor funds and then hurriedly went into receivership.
Pierpont then goes into great detail as to what tipped him off that Robyn Gardiner's outfit was headed for financial disaster. What's amazing is that the adventure also sucked in S$27.5million of the Singaporean government's money - and once again we reiterate, without having made a single film.
The business side o the film industry can be quite opaque to outside observers, what with all these different types of 'producers', but in a nutshell it comes down to finishing up with a product on a certain date and delivering it to the market in the manner desired by the exhibitors. It goes without saying that the content has to be good and compelling; but also the films have to be able to go into other ancillary markets.
It's really hard to make money back from the market if you don't make a single film and call yourself a production company, while pulling down studio exec paychecks. Naturally, it follows that we have to be suspicious of the people involved, whether they really had any intention to produce any films, or not as the case may be. Without accusing anybody of anything, the track record described does make one wonder as to where exactly the priorities of the executives of RGM sat, given that inglorious track record.
Faking Bad
One understands that the free-to-air TV business is under great strain, like at no other time in the relatively short history of free-to-air television, with business models crumbling and advertising revenue plummeting. In that light it seemed rather odd that Lachlan Murdoch and Jamie Packer put themselves on the board of the Ten Network. Under their ownership, Ten has sunk from about $1.50 a share to 33cents. Some unkind people have been calling the Ten Network 'Two.Tel' and 'Ten.Tel'.
You get the drift.
Today, I found this article in the SMH that led me to think maybe this wasn't entirely unplanned.
As of this writing, Gina Rinehart has joined the other billionaires, so she too is playing ball. What if the billionaires were indeed planning on privatising the Ten Network and having decided on that course of action, gone to own trying to drive the share price down by driving the business into the ground? Could this even be possible?
You could see the motive, but that alone doesn't prove anything. They have the means to do such a thing, and sure enough the share price for Ten has gone down steadily in the last 24months. You'd be hard pressed to say the possibility wasn't there.
A heads-up from Pleiades gave me this wonderful view of how a company purporting to be a Film & TV production company soaked up millions in investor funds and then hurriedly went into receivership.
Pierpont never watched the sitcom, Hey Dad, so his withers were unwrung last September when its lead actor, Robert Hughes, was charged with sexually assaulting children.
Your correspondent has no idea whether Robert is guilty or not. However, while the authorities are at it, they might take a look at his wife’s company, where the wallets of investors have been getting assaulted a bit for the past couple of years.
Robert is married to Robyn Gardiner, who is quite a movie celebrity in her own right. In 1982 she set up Robyn Gardiner Management, attracting a galaxy of 300 clients including Cate Blanchett, Sigourney Weaver and Lisa McCune.
In 2005, Robyn moved her RGM group to Singapore to expand into Asian movies and TV.
In 2010, RGM Media listed in Australia. Since then it has burned through some $14 million and gone into administration without – as far as Pierpont can ascertain – ever producing a single movie or TV show.
Pierpont then goes into great detail as to what tipped him off that Robyn Gardiner's outfit was headed for financial disaster. What's amazing is that the adventure also sucked in S$27.5million of the Singaporean government's money - and once again we reiterate, without having made a single film.
The business side o the film industry can be quite opaque to outside observers, what with all these different types of 'producers', but in a nutshell it comes down to finishing up with a product on a certain date and delivering it to the market in the manner desired by the exhibitors. It goes without saying that the content has to be good and compelling; but also the films have to be able to go into other ancillary markets.
It's really hard to make money back from the market if you don't make a single film and call yourself a production company, while pulling down studio exec paychecks. Naturally, it follows that we have to be suspicious of the people involved, whether they really had any intention to produce any films, or not as the case may be. Without accusing anybody of anything, the track record described does make one wonder as to where exactly the priorities of the executives of RGM sat, given that inglorious track record.
Faking Bad
One understands that the free-to-air TV business is under great strain, like at no other time in the relatively short history of free-to-air television, with business models crumbling and advertising revenue plummeting. In that light it seemed rather odd that Lachlan Murdoch and Jamie Packer put themselves on the board of the Ten Network. Under their ownership, Ten has sunk from about $1.50 a share to 33cents. Some unkind people have been calling the Ten Network 'Two.Tel' and 'Ten.Tel'.
You get the drift.
Today, I found this article in the SMH that led me to think maybe this wasn't entirely unplanned.
A report released on Thursday by BBY media analyst Mark McDonnell boldly states: ''We do not accept the chairman's [Lachlan Murdoch's] description of this raising as 'prudent' - a better term would be excessive, given the resulting net cash position and the practical effect of almost halving the value of shares from already historic lows due to the massive dilution.''
McDonnell believes Ten's latest equity raising - the second in six months - could well be a form of creeping privatisation by a few ''insiders''.
It is an interesting theory, given the equity issue will thrust Ten from a net debt position to a net cash position. On the face of it the move seems extreme, given it has been achieved at a massive 38 per cent discount that will result in up to 2.5 billion shares on issue.
Billionaires Lachlan Murdoch, James Packer and Bruce Gordon, who collectively control 32 per cent of the company, have agreed to support the latest $225 million equity issue. The other billionaire board member, Gina Rinehart, who turned up 45 minutes late to Ten's annual meeting on Thursday, has opted to keep everyone in the dark about her intentions.
As of this writing, Gina Rinehart has joined the other billionaires, so she too is playing ball. What if the billionaires were indeed planning on privatising the Ten Network and having decided on that course of action, gone to own trying to drive the share price down by driving the business into the ground? Could this even be possible?
You could see the motive, but that alone doesn't prove anything. They have the means to do such a thing, and sure enough the share price for Ten has gone down steadily in the last 24months. You'd be hard pressed to say the possibility wasn't there.
2012/11/29
'Skyfall'
Bond At 50 years
It's hard to write something new about James Bond movies in light of 50years of Bond movies. One ca imagine it's even harder to come up with a new script and a new threat. This current Bond movie is getting rave reviews from otherwise difficult-to-please people so it's interesting that the Bond Movie that brings up the half-century is still hitting its mark.
What's Good About It
Some of the action set pieces in this one are more visceral and tense than in 'Quantum of Solace'. The title sequence is pretty cool, but maybe not as cool as the one on 'Casino Royale'. That one was pretty special. At least in this one, like it is in 'Casino Royale, the action has a sense of space and time in which things take place. The frenetic post- 'Jason Bourne' action seqeunces in Quantum of Solace were pretty ridiculous.
Some of the stunts in the earlier part are great. The action towards the climax seems more like a re-run of the sot o action we used to see in the early Die Hard movies. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in the context of a Bond movie. Bond is a man of action after all.
What's Bad About It
It's been said for many years that James Bond the character is a sociopath, and may even be some kind of psychopath. the man never really changes. The moments we've seen Bond change as a result of the action are few and far in between. The greatness of 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' with George Lazenby lies with the ending which strongly suggests Bond is transformed. There really isn't an equivalent moment in Roger Moore's tenure, which in most part was about a glib one liner in the face of immensely awful violence.
Once again, having gotten to the third film, Daniel Craig's Bond is showing the strain of being unable to transform. In the absence of the glibness he's got fewer means to charm, and at this point in the Bond franchise, he's actually a standout for having the least charm.
What's Interesting About It
There have been all kinds of articles about James Bond in the 50th anniversary of Dr. No coinciding with this film. One of the most interesting was the graph put together in the Economist.
Look, I'm no Nate Silver, but I do put trust in what numbers say about players. :)
As you can see, as thuggish as Daniel Craig's Bond might seem, he had nothing on the kill total of the Pierce Brosnan Bond. The Bond with the least kills and by extension, the least action was Timothy Dalton, which tallies with my impression of his low octane Bond Movies. Craig's Bond is about on par with Connery' Bond in terms of kills per movie, which flies in the face of Connery's complaint that Bond these days is about the killing. If Mr. Connery could have a whinge about Craig's Bond using his own Bond as a yard stick, it would be that Bond seems to gets laid less and drinks more.
Moore's Bond drank the least and killed fewer than Connery, Craig or 'Killer' Brosnan. I sort of expected him to get laid more, but that doesn't seem to have been the case. George Lazenby's Bond had a better track record in his one appearance, than the averaged efforts of the others.
For my money, I suspect the Brosnan Bond movies are more up my alley judging from the body count - but I remember being so appalled by 'Tomorrow Never Dies', I never went to see the rest of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies after that; I gave up on Bond movies until they rebooted with 'Casino Royale'. 'Quantum of Solace' sorely tested my patience. If the Brosnan Bonds are anything to go by, - and as Sick Boy observes in 'Trainspotting' one day you have it, and then you don't - I wouldn't put much stock in the next two Bond movies being any good, even with Daniel Craig doing his damnedest.
It's hard to write something new about James Bond movies in light of 50years of Bond movies. One ca imagine it's even harder to come up with a new script and a new threat. This current Bond movie is getting rave reviews from otherwise difficult-to-please people so it's interesting that the Bond Movie that brings up the half-century is still hitting its mark.
What's Good About It
Some of the action set pieces in this one are more visceral and tense than in 'Quantum of Solace'. The title sequence is pretty cool, but maybe not as cool as the one on 'Casino Royale'. That one was pretty special. At least in this one, like it is in 'Casino Royale, the action has a sense of space and time in which things take place. The frenetic post- 'Jason Bourne' action seqeunces in Quantum of Solace were pretty ridiculous.
Some of the stunts in the earlier part are great. The action towards the climax seems more like a re-run of the sot o action we used to see in the early Die Hard movies. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in the context of a Bond movie. Bond is a man of action after all.
What's Bad About It
It's been said for many years that James Bond the character is a sociopath, and may even be some kind of psychopath. the man never really changes. The moments we've seen Bond change as a result of the action are few and far in between. The greatness of 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' with George Lazenby lies with the ending which strongly suggests Bond is transformed. There really isn't an equivalent moment in Roger Moore's tenure, which in most part was about a glib one liner in the face of immensely awful violence.
Once again, having gotten to the third film, Daniel Craig's Bond is showing the strain of being unable to transform. In the absence of the glibness he's got fewer means to charm, and at this point in the Bond franchise, he's actually a standout for having the least charm.
What's Interesting About It
There have been all kinds of articles about James Bond in the 50th anniversary of Dr. No coinciding with this film. One of the most interesting was the graph put together in the Economist.
Look, I'm no Nate Silver, but I do put trust in what numbers say about players. :)
As you can see, as thuggish as Daniel Craig's Bond might seem, he had nothing on the kill total of the Pierce Brosnan Bond. The Bond with the least kills and by extension, the least action was Timothy Dalton, which tallies with my impression of his low octane Bond Movies. Craig's Bond is about on par with Connery' Bond in terms of kills per movie, which flies in the face of Connery's complaint that Bond these days is about the killing. If Mr. Connery could have a whinge about Craig's Bond using his own Bond as a yard stick, it would be that Bond seems to gets laid less and drinks more.
Moore's Bond drank the least and killed fewer than Connery, Craig or 'Killer' Brosnan. I sort of expected him to get laid more, but that doesn't seem to have been the case. George Lazenby's Bond had a better track record in his one appearance, than the averaged efforts of the others.
For my money, I suspect the Brosnan Bond movies are more up my alley judging from the body count - but I remember being so appalled by 'Tomorrow Never Dies', I never went to see the rest of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies after that; I gave up on Bond movies until they rebooted with 'Casino Royale'. 'Quantum of Solace' sorely tested my patience. If the Brosnan Bonds are anything to go by, - and as Sick Boy observes in 'Trainspotting' one day you have it, and then you don't - I wouldn't put much stock in the next two Bond movies being any good, even with Daniel Craig doing his damnedest.
2012/11/28
Warriors Past
Restoration Of What Exactly?
Before I get into today's entry, I just want to say I can't stand the right wing nationalists in Japan. They drive around town in their black vans blaring their slogans and World War II era tunes that sound *terrible* through the megaphone speakers mounted on the roof. They create a commotion on crowded streets and really at their core, they're just nothing but nostalgists in denial.
So, when 80 year old Shintaro Ishihara goes into a national election in Japan forming a team with the Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto and his Japan Restoration party, one can't help but get a little suspicious of this so-called third force in politics. Indeed, in most modern (and post-modern and post-post-modern) democracies, the experience has been that the third force is invariably fascist, and conservatives are always conned into thinking fascists are the better allies than the old adversary, the progressives.
That's how Hitler and the Nazis snuck by the deteriorating Hindenburg, and brought about the end of the Weimar Republic. I dare say the rise of the Tea Party on the back of sloganeering idiocy of the likes of Sarah Palin tells you just enough that there really isn't much of a difference between the methods of the Nazis and the Tea Party. History tells us the third force is a collection of crackpots trying to disrupt the orthodoxy of the polity for its radical agenda.
In Shintaro Ishihara, we can see a man who is nostalgic for the kind of Japan that was a military power in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and it's an uncomfortable sort of nostalgia because it means he has to line up with those morons in the black vans and their megaphones. Any person with a modicum of sanity and good sense would stay away from that mob, but alas no, Ishihara wants to get third party going with the express hope of confronting Communist China.
This bring me to this column by Peter Hartcher today.
Those ghosts of the warriors are never too far away; and if you are Japanese, there's something deathly compelling about some of the symbols.
Why, even today in the Sankei Newspaper, they are celebrating the last 'operational' Zero Fighter.
It's exactly the kind of symbolism that stirs the hearts of nostalgists. I should know - it stirs something in me! And I'm not a nationalist - but I am a historian.
Before I get into today's entry, I just want to say I can't stand the right wing nationalists in Japan. They drive around town in their black vans blaring their slogans and World War II era tunes that sound *terrible* through the megaphone speakers mounted on the roof. They create a commotion on crowded streets and really at their core, they're just nothing but nostalgists in denial.
So, when 80 year old Shintaro Ishihara goes into a national election in Japan forming a team with the Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto and his Japan Restoration party, one can't help but get a little suspicious of this so-called third force in politics. Indeed, in most modern (and post-modern and post-post-modern) democracies, the experience has been that the third force is invariably fascist, and conservatives are always conned into thinking fascists are the better allies than the old adversary, the progressives.
That's how Hitler and the Nazis snuck by the deteriorating Hindenburg, and brought about the end of the Weimar Republic. I dare say the rise of the Tea Party on the back of sloganeering idiocy of the likes of Sarah Palin tells you just enough that there really isn't much of a difference between the methods of the Nazis and the Tea Party. History tells us the third force is a collection of crackpots trying to disrupt the orthodoxy of the polity for its radical agenda.
In Shintaro Ishihara, we can see a man who is nostalgic for the kind of Japan that was a military power in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and it's an uncomfortable sort of nostalgia because it means he has to line up with those morons in the black vans and their megaphones. Any person with a modicum of sanity and good sense would stay away from that mob, but alas no, Ishihara wants to get third party going with the express hope of confronting Communist China.
This bring me to this column by Peter Hartcher today.
Hashimoto and Ishihara are taking advantage of a growing disenchantment among Japan's voters with either of the major parties. But China, through its nationalist assertiveness, might be providing them with a new purpose and platform.
It would be a profound historical blunder if Beijing's decision to energise and enlarge its territorial claims turns out to have not only alarmed its neighbours and reinvigorated US commitment to the region - it has already managed to achieve these unintended consequences - but to have remilitarised its historical enemy Japan as well.
The Japanese people favour their current constitution and oppose nuclear armament. But China is giving the neonationalists an opening and they are taking it.
In the 1980s, the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, once counselled against then-prevalent 1980s complaints against Japan's commercial success.
''The Japanese are good merchants but they are better warriors,'' he said. And he didn't think Japan's underlying warrior prowess was dead, only dormant. China should be careful it does not push its neighbours too far.
Those ghosts of the warriors are never too far away; and if you are Japanese, there's something deathly compelling about some of the symbols.
Why, even today in the Sankei Newspaper, they are celebrating the last 'operational' Zero Fighter.
It's exactly the kind of symbolism that stirs the hearts of nostalgists. I should know - it stirs something in me! And I'm not a nationalist - but I am a historian.
2012/11/26
Movie Doubles - 'Terminal Trust' & 'The Three Stooges'
The Opposites On The Joy Scale
Today's movie double is an attempt to talk about two totally different movies linked by only one tenuous link, euthanasia.
'Terminal Trust' was one of the featured highlights of this year's Japanese Film Festival, which also saw the director Masayuki Suo and his wife and leading actress Tamiyo Kusakari make an appearance in Sydney. It's a heavy film which negotiates the tough waters of how a doctor arrives at a point to administer euthanasia, and if that's not heavy enough, it goes on to show how the prosecution system works in Japan, which is infuriating and frustrating. The film is on the whole, heavy, dark, depressing and full of protestations about the injustices of the Japanese justice system.
The Three Stooges on the other hand is a Farrelly Brothers movie. You know what you're going to get - furious slapstick - and you get it in spades.
I will say this for the latter film: I was really glad to watch it straight after seeing 'Terminal Trust'.
So... Euthanasia You Say...
'Terminal Trust' is an interesting movie in as much as it uses the important topic of euthanasia to vault into a deep investigation of the prosecutorial process in Japan. In that sense, euthanasia itself is what Hitchcock would have termed a maguffin. The film spends 2 hours going through a recollection to explain why the doctor finds herself in the office of the prosecutor, and it can be distilled simply as, she made the call for euthanasia when perhaps the circumstances didn't quite warrant it; and yet she believed strongly that was what the patient desired. What follows is 45minute scene in the prosecutor's office where the prosecutor bullies and browbeats her into signing a confession worded to suit his case.
In 'The Three Stooges', Larry, Curly and Moe need to make $830,000 in a hurry which invites the evil conspirators to hire Larry Curly and Moe to carry out a murder. The conspirators use the pretext that the husband needs to be euthanased, but he doesn't want to see it coming. Curly responds by immediately pushing one of the conspirators in front of the bus, landing him in hospital. The Stooges then try to fulfill the mission by entering a hospital to finish off the job. What's interesting in the sequence of events is that euthanasia is the implicit euphemism for murder.
And oddly enough that is exactly where both films land themselves. If euthanasia is interchangeable with murder, then it is no surprise that the doctor lands in front of the prosecutor, any more than Larry Curly Moe do their damned best to kill their target because they need to be euthanased properly. The grey area is amplified when the patient struggles in 'Terminal Trust' as well as the turtle-like resistance of Larry, Curly and Moe's target.
The Law Is An Ass? It's An Evil Motherfucker In Japan
I haven't lived in Japan for so long it's hard for me to get a feel for how courtroom dramas work in Japan or whether they even have those kinds of things. Japanese court scenes seem odd areas where the adversarial system seems to take some shape, but what I did not know until I saw this film is that Prosecutors get to:
All of this is pretty frightening just to watch in 'Terminal Trust' and the director assured us that this was about par for the course, and this is why he is involved with the juridical committee for the Ministry of Justice in Japan, trying to propose changes to the law so that there is more transparency.
Because I'm so used to seeing lawyers in action in the adversarial system through western courtroom dramas, I was apoplectic with my "but, but, but where's her lawyer?" shock.
Let's be frank, it's a brute violation of basic human rights; and yet this stuff goes on everyday in Japan. Which got me to be thinking, that if I were some kind of Yakuza crime lord and some prosecutor spoke to me the way they do in this film, I'd vow to kill the asshole. And then it occurred to me this is exactly why Japanese prosecutors don't go hard at organised crime in Japan. They can't beat a confession out of the Yakuza without endangering their own lives. Instead they beat up on the meek, framing them up for crimes they didn't commit.
A typical example of this is how 4 people were hauled into the prosecutor's offices because their email was hacked by some blackmailer. The prosecutor managed to force 2 of the 4 to confess to crimes they didn't commit. And presumably he was going to wave this 'stated confession' around in court as his central argument as to why the innocent must be placed in jail. You wonder if these people ever read the work of Franz Kafka.
But it's even worse than that. Once they get the suspect to sign the 'confession statement', they can then pull out an arrest warrant from the drawer, cuff the suspect on the spot and remand them for 21 more days for 'questioning' - before they see their lawyer. The Japanese police and prosecution boast of a 97% conviction rate - which is to say, they go after the soft targets and make them confess to crimes they haven't committed and send them to jail, all the while letting organised crime flourish.
Some people came out of the screening for 'Terminal Trust' demanding that Japan change its laws. I'd have to say I was one of them. I was so revolted, I rushed home and put on 'The Three Stooges'.
There is no doubt in my mind that 'Terminal Trust' is a very important film. It is immensely high-brow and so grave that you cannot argue with it; you are more overwhelmed by the massive legal edifice of how Japanese prosecutors do their dirty work
Fast & Furious Slapstick
In contrast to the high brow, high-minded 'Terminal Trust', 'The Three Stooges' is a decidedly low-brow, poke'em-in-the-eyes slapstick movie with virtually zero intellectual challenges in deciphering its meaning - because there is no deep underlying meaning. It's just a showcase of some actors being able to duplicate the fast and furious slapstick routines of the original Larry Curly and Moe. The surprising thing is just how good they are at doing this 'business'.
Watching 'The Three Stooges' took me back to moments from my own childhood when I used to watch this immensely violent psychotically hyperactive slapstick. The film was so evocative that the maudlin sentimentalism of the plot seemed to just float by.
What is tremendous about the original Three Stooges' oeuvre is that their chaotic routines of poking and hitting and hammering and stamping on each other is not the result of comedy degenerating to slapstick, but a sign that the essence of comedy being distilled to the point of its essential sadism. Consider a moment that comedy depends entirely on the creation of a victim. All the best jokes have somebody or something being the butt of the joke. With the Stooges, you saw the flip-flop of sadistic tormentor and hapless victim swap between the three members at a phenomenal pace. The senseless sadism of Moe results in knocked heads, poked eyes, squeezed noses, pulled nose hairs and hair, while immediate retaliation from Curly and Larry result in misdirected blows hitting one another, increasing the cycle of violence.
In a sense the fast and furious slapstick routines are mini-critiques of social interaction as sadistic interlocution. Some weeks ago, I pointed to Woody Allen's interpretation of the Three Stooges through the stylings of Truman Capote, and I have to say that Woody Allen does a marvelous job of connecting the apparent senselessness of the violent interplay with the apparent senselessness of a God-less universe. What draws me greatly to the Three Stooges and this remake at this point in my life is that I like the reification of violence, comedy, sadism and victimhood. The lower the mode of comedy goes (and the Stooges even in this incarnation are uncompromisingly low and nose-turned down), the more acceleration we feel towards the laughing end.
Or more to the point, if I were the doctor on 'Terminal Trust', I might have just stood up and poked the prosecutor in the eyes with my index finger and middle finger and then swiftly twisted his nose by pinching it between my index knuckle and middle knuckle with a 'Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk! Wise guy huh?'
...but that's just me.
High Brow, Low Brow
It's interesting how the higher the brow, the lower your spirits are when you come out of the movie. The lower the brow, the more uplifted you feel. What is that?
The modern incarnation of the Three Stooges is uplifting as 'Terminal Trust' is down-stamping.
Acting As Construct
The director of 'Terminal Trust' mentioned that the reason the prosecution sequence seemed to be more theatrical than the rest of the film where everything else was naturalistic had to do with the unnaturalness of the conversation that takes place between the prosecutor and suspect. The prosecutor is 'acting' because there is no way he speaks to people in his own private life like he does in the office.
This is an interesting notion because in 'The Three Stooges', Larry Curly and Moe stumble into a room and begin to blame one another for their failings, eventually launching into one of the most brutal-looking slapstick routines, only for Moe to find out they had done so in front of a casting crew for a reality TV show. The casting people assume that Moe's persona is an act.
Now, we know that Moe in the context of the Three Stooges is an act; but this is layered on by the fact that the Moe we're seeing is not the original Moe but an actor playing a representation of the Moe character created by Moe Howard. Moe is then cast in a Reality TV show, where all the personae are masks of some kind, representing yet another layer of acting in our society. There are layers upon layers of 'acting' that you actually find it hard to parse which bit might not be the acting.
The more serious a film gets, the more the acting tends towards naturalism. A serious film cannot withstand the indelicacy of a schtick or an artifice. The less serious the tone of a film, comedy seems to gain power by layering levels of acting upon the characters. This may be why there are so many comedy pieces through history where characters pretend to be something they are not. We watch, not for the Cathartic denouement, but for the Cathartic rupture of laughter.
Anti-Catholicism
If you look around the net a bit, you'll find that there are complaints about 'The Three Stooges' being 'Anti-Catholic'. This may be true, in as much as one of the nuns gets portrayed in a bikini as a babe, while another nun is a truly repugnant sister Mary Mengele, played by a man.
However, I'd like to point out some things...
Now, I'm not anti-Catholic myself ("some of my best friends are Catholic!"); I'm totally outside of this issue, but I do think that if you are a worldly power, sometimes you just have to cop it sweet when you're made the butt of jokes. Complaining about it makes you look worse.
Today's movie double is an attempt to talk about two totally different movies linked by only one tenuous link, euthanasia.
'Terminal Trust' was one of the featured highlights of this year's Japanese Film Festival, which also saw the director Masayuki Suo and his wife and leading actress Tamiyo Kusakari make an appearance in Sydney. It's a heavy film which negotiates the tough waters of how a doctor arrives at a point to administer euthanasia, and if that's not heavy enough, it goes on to show how the prosecution system works in Japan, which is infuriating and frustrating. The film is on the whole, heavy, dark, depressing and full of protestations about the injustices of the Japanese justice system.
The Three Stooges on the other hand is a Farrelly Brothers movie. You know what you're going to get - furious slapstick - and you get it in spades.
I will say this for the latter film: I was really glad to watch it straight after seeing 'Terminal Trust'.
So... Euthanasia You Say...
'Terminal Trust' is an interesting movie in as much as it uses the important topic of euthanasia to vault into a deep investigation of the prosecutorial process in Japan. In that sense, euthanasia itself is what Hitchcock would have termed a maguffin. The film spends 2 hours going through a recollection to explain why the doctor finds herself in the office of the prosecutor, and it can be distilled simply as, she made the call for euthanasia when perhaps the circumstances didn't quite warrant it; and yet she believed strongly that was what the patient desired. What follows is 45minute scene in the prosecutor's office where the prosecutor bullies and browbeats her into signing a confession worded to suit his case.
In 'The Three Stooges', Larry, Curly and Moe need to make $830,000 in a hurry which invites the evil conspirators to hire Larry Curly and Moe to carry out a murder. The conspirators use the pretext that the husband needs to be euthanased, but he doesn't want to see it coming. Curly responds by immediately pushing one of the conspirators in front of the bus, landing him in hospital. The Stooges then try to fulfill the mission by entering a hospital to finish off the job. What's interesting in the sequence of events is that euthanasia is the implicit euphemism for murder.
And oddly enough that is exactly where both films land themselves. If euthanasia is interchangeable with murder, then it is no surprise that the doctor lands in front of the prosecutor, any more than Larry Curly Moe do their damned best to kill their target because they need to be euthanased properly. The grey area is amplified when the patient struggles in 'Terminal Trust' as well as the turtle-like resistance of Larry, Curly and Moe's target.
The Law Is An Ass? It's An Evil Motherfucker In Japan
I haven't lived in Japan for so long it's hard for me to get a feel for how courtroom dramas work in Japan or whether they even have those kinds of things. Japanese court scenes seem odd areas where the adversarial system seems to take some shape, but what I did not know until I saw this film is that Prosecutors get to:
- summon their suspects (with a summons to which they must comply)
- interrogate them without a lawyer present
- write out the 'stated confession' on behalf of the suspect
- make them sign it, even though it is not in their own words
- use this 'stated confession' as the centre piece of their argument when the trial proceeds.
All of this is pretty frightening just to watch in 'Terminal Trust' and the director assured us that this was about par for the course, and this is why he is involved with the juridical committee for the Ministry of Justice in Japan, trying to propose changes to the law so that there is more transparency.
Because I'm so used to seeing lawyers in action in the adversarial system through western courtroom dramas, I was apoplectic with my "but, but, but where's her lawyer?" shock.
Let's be frank, it's a brute violation of basic human rights; and yet this stuff goes on everyday in Japan. Which got me to be thinking, that if I were some kind of Yakuza crime lord and some prosecutor spoke to me the way they do in this film, I'd vow to kill the asshole. And then it occurred to me this is exactly why Japanese prosecutors don't go hard at organised crime in Japan. They can't beat a confession out of the Yakuza without endangering their own lives. Instead they beat up on the meek, framing them up for crimes they didn't commit.
A typical example of this is how 4 people were hauled into the prosecutor's offices because their email was hacked by some blackmailer. The prosecutor managed to force 2 of the 4 to confess to crimes they didn't commit. And presumably he was going to wave this 'stated confession' around in court as his central argument as to why the innocent must be placed in jail. You wonder if these people ever read the work of Franz Kafka.
But it's even worse than that. Once they get the suspect to sign the 'confession statement', they can then pull out an arrest warrant from the drawer, cuff the suspect on the spot and remand them for 21 more days for 'questioning' - before they see their lawyer. The Japanese police and prosecution boast of a 97% conviction rate - which is to say, they go after the soft targets and make them confess to crimes they haven't committed and send them to jail, all the while letting organised crime flourish.
Some people came out of the screening for 'Terminal Trust' demanding that Japan change its laws. I'd have to say I was one of them. I was so revolted, I rushed home and put on 'The Three Stooges'.
There is no doubt in my mind that 'Terminal Trust' is a very important film. It is immensely high-brow and so grave that you cannot argue with it; you are more overwhelmed by the massive legal edifice of how Japanese prosecutors do their dirty work
Fast & Furious Slapstick
In contrast to the high brow, high-minded 'Terminal Trust', 'The Three Stooges' is a decidedly low-brow, poke'em-in-the-eyes slapstick movie with virtually zero intellectual challenges in deciphering its meaning - because there is no deep underlying meaning. It's just a showcase of some actors being able to duplicate the fast and furious slapstick routines of the original Larry Curly and Moe. The surprising thing is just how good they are at doing this 'business'.
Watching 'The Three Stooges' took me back to moments from my own childhood when I used to watch this immensely violent psychotically hyperactive slapstick. The film was so evocative that the maudlin sentimentalism of the plot seemed to just float by.
What is tremendous about the original Three Stooges' oeuvre is that their chaotic routines of poking and hitting and hammering and stamping on each other is not the result of comedy degenerating to slapstick, but a sign that the essence of comedy being distilled to the point of its essential sadism. Consider a moment that comedy depends entirely on the creation of a victim. All the best jokes have somebody or something being the butt of the joke. With the Stooges, you saw the flip-flop of sadistic tormentor and hapless victim swap between the three members at a phenomenal pace. The senseless sadism of Moe results in knocked heads, poked eyes, squeezed noses, pulled nose hairs and hair, while immediate retaliation from Curly and Larry result in misdirected blows hitting one another, increasing the cycle of violence.
In a sense the fast and furious slapstick routines are mini-critiques of social interaction as sadistic interlocution. Some weeks ago, I pointed to Woody Allen's interpretation of the Three Stooges through the stylings of Truman Capote, and I have to say that Woody Allen does a marvelous job of connecting the apparent senselessness of the violent interplay with the apparent senselessness of a God-less universe. What draws me greatly to the Three Stooges and this remake at this point in my life is that I like the reification of violence, comedy, sadism and victimhood. The lower the mode of comedy goes (and the Stooges even in this incarnation are uncompromisingly low and nose-turned down), the more acceleration we feel towards the laughing end.
Or more to the point, if I were the doctor on 'Terminal Trust', I might have just stood up and poked the prosecutor in the eyes with my index finger and middle finger and then swiftly twisted his nose by pinching it between my index knuckle and middle knuckle with a 'Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk! Wise guy huh?'
...but that's just me.
High Brow, Low Brow
It's interesting how the higher the brow, the lower your spirits are when you come out of the movie. The lower the brow, the more uplifted you feel. What is that?
The modern incarnation of the Three Stooges is uplifting as 'Terminal Trust' is down-stamping.
Acting As Construct
The director of 'Terminal Trust' mentioned that the reason the prosecution sequence seemed to be more theatrical than the rest of the film where everything else was naturalistic had to do with the unnaturalness of the conversation that takes place between the prosecutor and suspect. The prosecutor is 'acting' because there is no way he speaks to people in his own private life like he does in the office.
This is an interesting notion because in 'The Three Stooges', Larry Curly and Moe stumble into a room and begin to blame one another for their failings, eventually launching into one of the most brutal-looking slapstick routines, only for Moe to find out they had done so in front of a casting crew for a reality TV show. The casting people assume that Moe's persona is an act.
Now, we know that Moe in the context of the Three Stooges is an act; but this is layered on by the fact that the Moe we're seeing is not the original Moe but an actor playing a representation of the Moe character created by Moe Howard. Moe is then cast in a Reality TV show, where all the personae are masks of some kind, representing yet another layer of acting in our society. There are layers upon layers of 'acting' that you actually find it hard to parse which bit might not be the acting.
The more serious a film gets, the more the acting tends towards naturalism. A serious film cannot withstand the indelicacy of a schtick or an artifice. The less serious the tone of a film, comedy seems to gain power by layering levels of acting upon the characters. This may be why there are so many comedy pieces through history where characters pretend to be something they are not. We watch, not for the Cathartic denouement, but for the Cathartic rupture of laughter.
Anti-Catholicism
If you look around the net a bit, you'll find that there are complaints about 'The Three Stooges' being 'Anti-Catholic'. This may be true, in as much as one of the nuns gets portrayed in a bikini as a babe, while another nun is a truly repugnant sister Mary Mengele, played by a man.
However, I'd like to point out some things...
- The Catholic Church did support the Nazis against the Communist Soviets and then helped many Nazis escape to South America.
- The Catholic Church is against euthanasia.
- The Catholic Church is lucky the film didn't portray the priests fiddling with the orphans in their care, given the dire history of such things in the real world.
Now, I'm not anti-Catholic myself ("some of my best friends are Catholic!"); I'm totally outside of this issue, but I do think that if you are a worldly power, sometimes you just have to cop it sweet when you're made the butt of jokes. Complaining about it makes you look worse.
2012/11/25
The Zero-Sum World
The Energy Limit To Growth
One of the notions being presented as the reason growth is hard to come by in the post-GFC world is that the energy costs are too high. Take for example this article here from some outfit called NEF.
The gist of the argument is that as the cost of oil itself rises, this rising cost limits the capacity for growth. Advanced economies are more likely to feel the pain as crude oil hits the $90 per barrel level while China can allegedly still handle a rise of up to $100-110, but the projected price of oil is going to be more like $180 a barrel. In other words, pain is on the way.
The silver lining on all this is that it may actually prompt the world to move away from its heavy reliance on hydrocarbons, but the transition away from hydrocarbons is going to be pretty expensive.
What all this points to is that the size of economic growth in coming years is going to be much smaller than before the GFC, and this render the world economy a kind of Zero sum game where somebody's gain is going to be somebody's loss. In the past, this kind of notion was pushed aside because economic growth had a way of making the pie bigger, rather than splitting the same pie in different ways. Indeed, if there is one reason why economic growth was valued so highly by our societies in advanced economies is that as long as there is growth, it staves off the zero-sum game.
The problem then in the zero sum world is that anybody who gains is doing it at the expense of somebody else. Take labour costs for instance. When people like Gina Rinehart bang on about productivity, what she's really saying is she wants to pay less for the labour component of the production of her mined commodities. It's the fault of the unions (and by extension the ALP) that won't allow her to make more of a buck per ton of coal and iron ore.
If she were to have her way, the miners would get a pay cut, and she would get to have more of the share of the sales (did we mention the bit where she ants to have her profit taxed less?); and this pay cut represents an increase in productivity. Much of the third world understands this as the garment factory that comes from America to exploit child labour and families in sweatshops, far away from the advanced economies, out of sight - and they want this business.
However in an advanced economy, any increase in productivity would mean the lengthening of the unemployment queue because there aren't any growth industries to absorb the unemployed. In advanced economies, people are less flexible to move from one specialised sophisticated area of work to another; which makes it even more unlikely for people who lose their jobs to productivity rises to find new employment.
The bottom line is that 'big government' models where we pay welfare to the people who are forced out for the sake of these productivity rises are going to find it financially tough without raising taxes; while 'small government' models will have a greater disparity of wealth in their societies leading to instability. You can pick either option but in a zero sum game, somebody has to lose, and somebody is going to be unhappy. To be honest, I don't know if people will want to really go down the avenue of the 'small government' only to find social instability and a replay of the French revolution on the cards (just look at the Arab Spring and the end of Gaddafi) . Even the recent election in America points to a picture where the kind of economic fascism advocated by the wealthy was put back in its box.
Gina Rinehart should really be careful what she asks for with her rants about productivity in a low-growth environment. If she has her way, she may be contributing to sticking her own head on the metaphorical guillotine down the track.
One of the notions being presented as the reason growth is hard to come by in the post-GFC world is that the energy costs are too high. Take for example this article here from some outfit called NEF.
The gist of the argument is that as the cost of oil itself rises, this rising cost limits the capacity for growth. Advanced economies are more likely to feel the pain as crude oil hits the $90 per barrel level while China can allegedly still handle a rise of up to $100-110, but the projected price of oil is going to be more like $180 a barrel. In other words, pain is on the way.
The silver lining on all this is that it may actually prompt the world to move away from its heavy reliance on hydrocarbons, but the transition away from hydrocarbons is going to be pretty expensive.
What all this points to is that the size of economic growth in coming years is going to be much smaller than before the GFC, and this render the world economy a kind of Zero sum game where somebody's gain is going to be somebody's loss. In the past, this kind of notion was pushed aside because economic growth had a way of making the pie bigger, rather than splitting the same pie in different ways. Indeed, if there is one reason why economic growth was valued so highly by our societies in advanced economies is that as long as there is growth, it staves off the zero-sum game.
The problem then in the zero sum world is that anybody who gains is doing it at the expense of somebody else. Take labour costs for instance. When people like Gina Rinehart bang on about productivity, what she's really saying is she wants to pay less for the labour component of the production of her mined commodities. It's the fault of the unions (and by extension the ALP) that won't allow her to make more of a buck per ton of coal and iron ore.
If she were to have her way, the miners would get a pay cut, and she would get to have more of the share of the sales (did we mention the bit where she ants to have her profit taxed less?); and this pay cut represents an increase in productivity. Much of the third world understands this as the garment factory that comes from America to exploit child labour and families in sweatshops, far away from the advanced economies, out of sight - and they want this business.
However in an advanced economy, any increase in productivity would mean the lengthening of the unemployment queue because there aren't any growth industries to absorb the unemployed. In advanced economies, people are less flexible to move from one specialised sophisticated area of work to another; which makes it even more unlikely for people who lose their jobs to productivity rises to find new employment.
The bottom line is that 'big government' models where we pay welfare to the people who are forced out for the sake of these productivity rises are going to find it financially tough without raising taxes; while 'small government' models will have a greater disparity of wealth in their societies leading to instability. You can pick either option but in a zero sum game, somebody has to lose, and somebody is going to be unhappy. To be honest, I don't know if people will want to really go down the avenue of the 'small government' only to find social instability and a replay of the French revolution on the cards (just look at the Arab Spring and the end of Gaddafi) . Even the recent election in America points to a picture where the kind of economic fascism advocated by the wealthy was put back in its box.
Gina Rinehart should really be careful what she asks for with her rants about productivity in a low-growth environment. If she has her way, she may be contributing to sticking her own head on the metaphorical guillotine down the track.
2012/11/24
A Tough Spot
Fair Game
This business of Julia Gillard in her time as Slater and Gordon lawyer and union apparatchik just keeps going on. The most interesting bit of information was brought to light on the 7:30 Report wherein an old colleague of hers at S&G Melbourne pointed out that she did after all, leave under a cloud.
That's actually a bit of a problem. If Ms Gillard was living in the house with her live in boyfriend who got a mortgage and she didn't know from whence it came, it strikes one as being entirely out of character. By Julia Gillard's denials, we're being asked to believe that she didn't know, didn't ask, didn't care to ask, like somebody with fairly impaired critical thinking faculties. Maybe that's true, but then I would find it very frightening that such a person was the Prime Minister of the land.
It is far more believable to say she knew these things. If she didn't know for sure, she intuited them - and then lied at the meeting with the partners. The rest of that transcript makes for some interesting reading. In a nutshell, she knew and lied to the partners, and there's really no other explanation for it. So this thing isn't going to go away, now that there's solid evidence that contradicts her account.
It seems odd that we're raking through this grubby business in union land almost two decades ago, but let's consider for the moment the retroactive scrutiny Tony Abbott has received for his boorish behaviour at St John's College at the University of Sydney dating back to 1978, and you'd have to say this was fair game. My own intuition says this business really won't go away and that the Prime Minister is on a hiding to nothing trying to stonewall it with denials. You get the feeling that the young Julia Gillard was somebody who thought nothing of circumventing rules and regulations. If I'm getting that impression, I think the electorate is going to look to really dump her at the next polls.
UPDATE:
Peter Hartcher has this article this morning in the Sydney Morning Herald.
That seems like it's going to be not much fun for the government. Combined with the fiasco unfolding in NSW over Eddie Obeid, I won't wonder what on earth brought the ALP to this point, but you realise it's history and vested interests. It's not absolute power that corrupts absolutely; it seems anybody who is corruptible, will necessarily become corrupt on their way to power. One shouldn't be surprised to find that Julia Gillard had her moment in the corrupt soil of a corrupt union.
This business of Julia Gillard in her time as Slater and Gordon lawyer and union apparatchik just keeps going on. The most interesting bit of information was brought to light on the 7:30 Report wherein an old colleague of hers at S&G Melbourne pointed out that she did after all, leave under a cloud.
LEIGH SALES: Today you're releasing an extra section of the transcript of the Gillard interview at Slater & Gordon. What does it show?
NICK STYANT-BROWNE: What it shows is that Ms Gillard claimed at the interview in 1995 that the first she heard about the Slater & Gordon loan for the acquisition of the Kerr Street property was around August of that year. So, her claim is that the first she heard about the fact that the loan for the Kerr Street property was a Slater & Gordon mortgage was not until August of 1995, the transaction of course having taken place in March of 1993.
LEIGH SALES: OK. You've also released other documents. One is a fax from the Commonwealth Bank to Julia Gillard. What, in your opinion, does that show?
NICK STYANT-BROWNE: Yeah, I haven't released those documents, Leigh. Those documents form part of a conveyancing file which are now matters of public record. So they are from the conveyancing file which Mr Blewitt consented be released and made publicly available. Now what those documents show is that there is no doubt Ms Gillard knew of the mortgage from Slater & Gordon in March of 1993. And just to give you some examples, she personally arranged for the mortgage insurance for the Kerr Street property through the Commonwealth Bank and a letter was faxed to her on March 22 of 1993 from the Commonwealth Bank marked for her attention noting that the insurance had been renewed and further advising that the Slater & Gordon mortgage interest was noted on the policy of insurance.
That's actually a bit of a problem. If Ms Gillard was living in the house with her live in boyfriend who got a mortgage and she didn't know from whence it came, it strikes one as being entirely out of character. By Julia Gillard's denials, we're being asked to believe that she didn't know, didn't ask, didn't care to ask, like somebody with fairly impaired critical thinking faculties. Maybe that's true, but then I would find it very frightening that such a person was the Prime Minister of the land.
It is far more believable to say she knew these things. If she didn't know for sure, she intuited them - and then lied at the meeting with the partners. The rest of that transcript makes for some interesting reading. In a nutshell, she knew and lied to the partners, and there's really no other explanation for it. So this thing isn't going to go away, now that there's solid evidence that contradicts her account.
It seems odd that we're raking through this grubby business in union land almost two decades ago, but let's consider for the moment the retroactive scrutiny Tony Abbott has received for his boorish behaviour at St John's College at the University of Sydney dating back to 1978, and you'd have to say this was fair game. My own intuition says this business really won't go away and that the Prime Minister is on a hiding to nothing trying to stonewall it with denials. You get the feeling that the young Julia Gillard was somebody who thought nothing of circumventing rules and regulations. If I'm getting that impression, I think the electorate is going to look to really dump her at the next polls.
UPDATE:
Peter Hartcher has this article this morning in the Sydney Morning Herald.
So while he did not challenge the Prime Minister's version of events, neither did he mount a rousing defence of her. The political significance of this was not lost on Gillard's caucus, which is increasingly uneasy about the matter.
There is much detail but three central questions that Gillard will need to answer next week. Gillard has said she had no knowledge that Wilson stole the money and used some of it to buy a house in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy.
--
So the opposition's first central theme will be to demand to know what did Gillard know about the conveyancing and how much was she involved in the house-buying transaction? Did she know the source of all the funds?
Its second central theme will be to demand to know whether she received any personal benefit?
And third, the opposition will take up Gillard's account of events in which she discovered in 1995 that she had been deceived by her conman boyfriend.
Why didn't she report her discovery to the AWU, or the police, or help recover the money, the opposition will want to know?
The questions next week will overshadow any good news of the government's achievements. And its very existence could depend on the quality of her answers.
That seems like it's going to be not much fun for the government. Combined with the fiasco unfolding in NSW over Eddie Obeid, I won't wonder what on earth brought the ALP to this point, but you realise it's history and vested interests. It's not absolute power that corrupts absolutely; it seems anybody who is corruptible, will necessarily become corrupt on their way to power. One shouldn't be surprised to find that Julia Gillard had her moment in the corrupt soil of a corrupt union.
2012/11/16
BrisConnections Update
They Should Get Out Of Forecasting
This BrisConnections thing was pretty interesting a few years ago, but now the privately owned tunnel has hit the wall.
Here's Nick Bolton with the crux of the problem:
All of which is eminently sensible, and has been shown in court that entities such as Macquarie Bank continually use the same model to suite their purpose when raising money for these crappy schemes.
In fact the scuttlebutt doing the rounds is that Infrastructure NSW used the same 'forecasting' system to run their argument in favour of their 'WestConnex' pitch. If that were the case, then we'll probably end up seeing yet another replay of the Cross City Tunnel, Lane Cove Tunnel and this BrisConnections misadventure.
This BrisConnections thing was pretty interesting a few years ago, but now the privately owned tunnel has hit the wall.
BrisConnections shares went into a trading halt on Monday, November 14, at 0.4¢ each, when the board announced the $4.8 billion project could now be worth less than its outstanding debt, due to lower than expected traffic flows. It is now renegotiating with a 10-bank consortium of lenders. Two directors, Andrea Harcourt and Richard Wharton, resigned on Monday.
Back in 2009, Mr Bolton made front page news when he called a BrisConnections shareholders meeting to vote on winding up the project.
Here's Nick Bolton with the crux of the problem:
‘‘A tunnel can cost seven times more to build than an above ground toll road, and a driver is unlikely to pay seven times the toll to travel on it. Accordingly, it is almost impossible to get the economic argument to stand up for private ownership of tunnel infrastructure,’’ the Melbourne University drop-out turned internet millionaire turned celebrity investor told BusinessDay.
‘‘The concerning element is how neatly the traffic forecast seemed to fit the financial model put to investors, and how grossly inaccurate this forecast has turned out to be. It's worthwhile asking why that traffic forecast was selected, and whether there were any less optimistic forecasts available to the Directors at the time.’’
All of which is eminently sensible, and has been shown in court that entities such as Macquarie Bank continually use the same model to suite their purpose when raising money for these crappy schemes.
In fact the scuttlebutt doing the rounds is that Infrastructure NSW used the same 'forecasting' system to run their argument in favour of their 'WestConnex' pitch. If that were the case, then we'll probably end up seeing yet another replay of the Cross City Tunnel, Lane Cove Tunnel and this BrisConnections misadventure.
2012/11/08
Obama Wins
Not Even Close
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="510"]
Keep Calm[/caption]
For some weeks we've been hearing that the race was neck and neck and that the popular vote reflected a deeply divided America. Of course, I've been following Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com for a long while and it's been clear for some time that Obama's actually been ahead.
The little dip you see is after the first debate where Romney beat Obama, but even then the electoral college count never went below 285.
[caption id="attachment_5208" align="aligncenter" width="378"]
Nate Silver's tracking of polls[/caption]
As you can see in the third graph, the popular vote was tight, but then that's been what most pundits have been focusing on, saying it's neck and neck. If anything, Nate Silver's charts clearly show that Romney was doing a bang up job securing his base without making any headway into the crucial swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
That brings me to this bit in this coverage here:
That's really interesting right there. If the Republicans thought they were in it since the moment they nominated Romney, then they were very misguided; and the reason they were misguided is because they took the popular vote to be more important than what the distribution of the electoral colleges were going to be.
It's surprising that these people who are in a political party and therefore should understand how the election works, should have looked at the numbers Nate Silver was looking at. Silver had Obama beating Romney in a fluctuating zone of 59%-91%. Amazingly, some people thought Silver was pumping for the Democrats but right now as of this writing, Obama has 302 of the college votes, which means Silver has been as accurate as he was last time in 2008.
Which leads me to the point. How can these Republican types even be in politics if they don't understand how their own system works? It's not the raw popular vote. It's how the votes are distributed across electorates that matters.
Which leads me to the next thing in the live coverage that got my interest:
That's a really interesting point about the demographic right there. It goes hand in hand with Bill O'Reilly - he of the awful, awful, awful, spin-ful Fox News - having a whine about the death of the White Establishment. The 2008 election was a watershed because there were more urban voters than rural voters for the first time. This time, it became the election that could not be won by appealing to the White voters' racism alone.
And so the Republican Party clearly is at at the crossroads. They've got the wrong end of the demographic and going harder to the right and more conservative and more ideological is not going to get it done for them in coming elections. The curiosity now is how long they are going to persist with their dalliance with the irrational, Ayn-Rand-ist, racist, retrograde, ignorant and fearful Tea Party.
Judging from the number of Senate seats lost by Tea Party, it seems clear that the Tea Party is not going to come out of the 2012 election with any amount of credibility within the Republican Party. This is where it gets interesting. Fox News was already denouncing the Tea Party blaming them for Romney's loss - which is ironic because they're the very same people who gave so much air time to these crazies. Fox News may have successfully polarised the electorate through misinformation and propagandeering and generally misrepresenting arguments; but this has not translated one bit in to votes that mattered. If the way the swing states voted for Obama is any representation, then it is clear the biggest disservice done to the Republican Party might have been the blatant partisan-ship of Fox News. And if the demographic shift says anything, it is clear that Fox News' own viewership is a shrinking demographic. I wonder how Rupert likes the sting in that tail.
UPDATE: Obama finished up with Florida, winning 332 electoral votes in the end.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="510"]
Keep Calm[/caption]For some weeks we've been hearing that the race was neck and neck and that the popular vote reflected a deeply divided America. Of course, I've been following Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com for a long while and it's been clear for some time that Obama's actually been ahead.
The little dip you see is after the first debate where Romney beat Obama, but even then the electoral college count never went below 285.
[caption id="attachment_5208" align="aligncenter" width="378"]
Nate Silver's tracking of polls[/caption]As you can see in the third graph, the popular vote was tight, but then that's been what most pundits have been focusing on, saying it's neck and neck. If anything, Nate Silver's charts clearly show that Romney was doing a bang up job securing his base without making any headway into the crucial swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
That brings me to this bit in this coverage here:
The Republican failure to topple a president who was perceived as weak and divisive is expected to provoke a blood letting in the party.
The battle lines between those who say the party became too moderate and those who believe it is too radical are already drawn.
"If I hear anybody say it was because Romney wasn't conservative enough I'm going to go nuts. We're not losing 95% of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we're not being hard-ass enough, " the Republican senator Lindsey Graham told Politico, last week.
That's really interesting right there. If the Republicans thought they were in it since the moment they nominated Romney, then they were very misguided; and the reason they were misguided is because they took the popular vote to be more important than what the distribution of the electoral colleges were going to be.
It's surprising that these people who are in a political party and therefore should understand how the election works, should have looked at the numbers Nate Silver was looking at. Silver had Obama beating Romney in a fluctuating zone of 59%-91%. Amazingly, some people thought Silver was pumping for the Democrats but right now as of this writing, Obama has 302 of the college votes, which means Silver has been as accurate as he was last time in 2008.
Which leads me to the point. How can these Republican types even be in politics if they don't understand how their own system works? It's not the raw popular vote. It's how the votes are distributed across electorates that matters.
Which leads me to the next thing in the live coverage that got my interest:
If you want to get a strong feel for the demographic current underlying this election I strongly recommend Ron Brownstein from the National Journal who has been reminding readers for months that this will be the last election that the Republicans can attempt to win with a majority of white votes alone. It was a big risk that Obama took when he decided to embrace gay marriage, push back hard on efforts to restrict abortion and contraception (including a very public stoush with the Catholic Church) offer up a partial amnesty to young illegal immigrants and effectively concede non-college educated white men to the GOP. Instead of a coherent national message, the Obama campaign has stitched together a rainbow coalition.
So far tonight, it is looking like the risk paid off.
That's a really interesting point about the demographic right there. It goes hand in hand with Bill O'Reilly - he of the awful, awful, awful, spin-ful Fox News - having a whine about the death of the White Establishment. The 2008 election was a watershed because there were more urban voters than rural voters for the first time. This time, it became the election that could not be won by appealing to the White voters' racism alone.
And so the Republican Party clearly is at at the crossroads. They've got the wrong end of the demographic and going harder to the right and more conservative and more ideological is not going to get it done for them in coming elections. The curiosity now is how long they are going to persist with their dalliance with the irrational, Ayn-Rand-ist, racist, retrograde, ignorant and fearful Tea Party.
Judging from the number of Senate seats lost by Tea Party, it seems clear that the Tea Party is not going to come out of the 2012 election with any amount of credibility within the Republican Party. This is where it gets interesting. Fox News was already denouncing the Tea Party blaming them for Romney's loss - which is ironic because they're the very same people who gave so much air time to these crazies. Fox News may have successfully polarised the electorate through misinformation and propagandeering and generally misrepresenting arguments; but this has not translated one bit in to votes that mattered. If the way the swing states voted for Obama is any representation, then it is clear the biggest disservice done to the Republican Party might have been the blatant partisan-ship of Fox News. And if the demographic shift says anything, it is clear that Fox News' own viewership is a shrinking demographic. I wonder how Rupert likes the sting in that tail.
UPDATE: Obama finished up with Florida, winning 332 electoral votes in the end.
2012/10/29
Cockatoo Island Film Festival
The New Thing In Town
Sydney got itself a new film festival starting this year and it took place on Cockatoo Island. Out of an odd happenstance I ended up attending parts of it. I even made it to the Award Night where they handed pout their own inaugural gongs.
What's Good About It
They've done a nice job selling it as a film maker's festival, and it does take place on a beautiful part of Sydney. If you could conceive of a film festival in Sydney that was utterly unlike the Sydney Film Festival, this would have been the place to put it, and really, it has great promise for the future.
There's a lot of enthusiasm to it, and one suspects that it is going to be even more unlike the Sydney Film Festival which has established itself firmly with a particular kind of film-viewing public. The potential is there for it to grow into something really different and good. If nothing else it is unique and breaks the mold of what film festivals should be like
What's Bad About It
This year being the first time in Sydney - it's grown up and out of the Dungog Film Festival - it felt like it was more form over function. The organisation seemed in most part chaotic and planning underdone. It compared very unfavourably if you were a regular punter to the SFF and suddenly were confronted with the sense of out-of-control-ness the festival betrayed.
Volunteers were talking into their intercoms on their collars a lot, but the flow of information was anarchic. It looked great, but it didn't work as well as it looked.
Getting to and from the island can be a little haphazard, which is a minor complaint, but it's a real one all the same. Once you're on the island, you feel captive to the services and amenities available and they're not exactly good or cheap.
What's Interesting About It
There's a lot of space for the festival to grow, and I guess that's where the promise is. A few years back there was talk of slotting in a comedy festival in October on Cockatoo Island, which almost happened and never did. It might be an idea to run that concurrently on the Island as well as have a band competition.
The feeling I had while I staggered around the island was that there nearly wasn't enough to see or do at the festival, once you staggered out of movies. The flipside of it is the feeling that it could in future turn into a really varied, multifaceted event that attracts great talent from all over the world.
It sure beats stumbling in and out of the State Theatre with a bustling throng in the rain.
Sydney got itself a new film festival starting this year and it took place on Cockatoo Island. Out of an odd happenstance I ended up attending parts of it. I even made it to the Award Night where they handed pout their own inaugural gongs.
What's Good About It
They've done a nice job selling it as a film maker's festival, and it does take place on a beautiful part of Sydney. If you could conceive of a film festival in Sydney that was utterly unlike the Sydney Film Festival, this would have been the place to put it, and really, it has great promise for the future.
There's a lot of enthusiasm to it, and one suspects that it is going to be even more unlike the Sydney Film Festival which has established itself firmly with a particular kind of film-viewing public. The potential is there for it to grow into something really different and good. If nothing else it is unique and breaks the mold of what film festivals should be like
What's Bad About It
This year being the first time in Sydney - it's grown up and out of the Dungog Film Festival - it felt like it was more form over function. The organisation seemed in most part chaotic and planning underdone. It compared very unfavourably if you were a regular punter to the SFF and suddenly were confronted with the sense of out-of-control-ness the festival betrayed.
Volunteers were talking into their intercoms on their collars a lot, but the flow of information was anarchic. It looked great, but it didn't work as well as it looked.
Getting to and from the island can be a little haphazard, which is a minor complaint, but it's a real one all the same. Once you're on the island, you feel captive to the services and amenities available and they're not exactly good or cheap.
What's Interesting About It
There's a lot of space for the festival to grow, and I guess that's where the promise is. A few years back there was talk of slotting in a comedy festival in October on Cockatoo Island, which almost happened and never did. It might be an idea to run that concurrently on the Island as well as have a band competition.
The feeling I had while I staggered around the island was that there nearly wasn't enough to see or do at the festival, once you staggered out of movies. The flipside of it is the feeling that it could in future turn into a really varied, multifaceted event that attracts great talent from all over the world.
It sure beats stumbling in and out of the State Theatre with a bustling throng in the rain.
2012/10/27
News That's Fit To Punt - 26/Oct/2012
The Currency War
The Australian currency has been stuck above parity for some time and not even the lowering of interest rates has provided any 'relief' for the export industries of Australia.Except there's no relief in sight.
Pleiades sent in this link today as a kind of heads-up.
The contention there is that the Reserve Bank should probably cut interest rates in order not to attract foreign interest in our currency. Forget the housing bubble, just go to near zero interest rates.
I've been pondering that on this afternoon, and I think this is a crock. The cost of living in Australia is so far out of line with the CPI that nobody believes the inflation figures any more - they think it's much higher. This suggests that the interest rates should be sitting much higher than where they've been for at least a good decade. Mike Smith asking for the interest rates to be lowered is effective asking for there to be so much cheap money, it should inflate the value of property once again. In other words, the ANZ Bank chief is asking for a Price Keeping Operation to be staged out of the RBA.
One imagines the hope there is that if there's so much cheap money around, surely it will get sucked into the property market and reignite those big gains in the banks' balance sheets. You have to wonder if this isn't just another vested interest mouthing off, because it sure sounds like it.
Hewson Slams Vested Interests
There's one thing about John Hewson we can all be certain about - he was Australia' Mitt Romney without the Mormonism but with Economic Rationalism as his religion instead. If nothing else he gave the Liberal Party some kind of ideological frame work from which to work, and some of it has worked out well for Australia.
It's interesting then when he pipes up and lobs a verbal grenade in the direction of the NSW government and its approval of Jamie Packer building a second casino for Sydney.
So, there's that phrase again: vested interest.
Small Arts Companies Get The Squeeze
Pleiades sent in this one as well, about how small arts companies are getting less money now that everybody is having to look for some austerity.
You feel for these arts companies. They have a tougher proposition than film producers for a start.
One of the things that the Liberal Party embraced gingerly toward the end of their time before the Ruddslide was the fact that a lot of people in the arts were small business as well; and that the conservatives' general disregard for the arts and arts funding had created a massive gulf between it and the arts community in Australia. Certainly, under most of John Howard's tenure as PM, the prevailing mood was that all arts participants were left-voting scumbag and deserved not one iota from the public purse. When you realise how many of these small arts companies are around, you wonder why and how a party in favour of small businesses could have treated them with neglect for so long.
In turn, you'd have to say that the ALP for its money has taken for granted that people in the arts are generally more socially progressive and have bred a variety of arts bureaucrats that form a crazy subculture of their own, and choke off the promise of the arts itself. You get the feeling that the ALP is a latter day Stalinist apparatus that seeks to ideologically constrain discourse through the arts by funding particular kinds of things that never makes any money.
So I guess it's not surprising they get slammed by the likes of John Roskam in the AFR:
That's a bit mean. earlier in the column is a castigation about French critics who forged a path to an unbridled kind of relativism in the late 20th Century that continues to appall moralists the world over; but that's not surprising that a conservative think tank would take offense to Derrida and Foucault. Derrida, of course being that 'Obscurantist Terror' - and there's a war going against terror to this day.
Jokes aside, the two articles give you the distinct feeling that the arts really are not valued or are important in our cultural life in Australia. More to the point, we're a nation of hardened, committed, willful, fully ideological, philistines. It's a shame the arts as a vested interest holds absolutely no sway over the conscience of this nation.
The Australian currency has been stuck above parity for some time and not even the lowering of interest rates has provided any 'relief' for the export industries of Australia.Except there's no relief in sight.
Pleiades sent in this link today as a kind of heads-up.
According to (ANZ boss Mike) Smith, the Reserve Bank criteria for interest rate decisions should be dominated by the dollar. I pointed out yesterday that the currency wars and the money printing taking place in Europe and the US could send the Australian dollar much higher. Smith says that the huge liquidity in the system is going to start speculation on commodities and with the consequent higher prices will come an Australian dollar that goes even higher.
Interest rates become the only weapon the Reserve Bank has to prevent the further damage that is in store for our employment creating industries like tourism, education and manufacturing.
Mike Smith adds that central bankers are far wiser than he on these matters. I think Smith is absolutely right about everything except that last point. Smith is mixing in global markets every day and he is hearing concern around the regions about the repercussions of the US and European money printing and the currency war.
The contention there is that the Reserve Bank should probably cut interest rates in order not to attract foreign interest in our currency. Forget the housing bubble, just go to near zero interest rates.
I've been pondering that on this afternoon, and I think this is a crock. The cost of living in Australia is so far out of line with the CPI that nobody believes the inflation figures any more - they think it's much higher. This suggests that the interest rates should be sitting much higher than where they've been for at least a good decade. Mike Smith asking for the interest rates to be lowered is effective asking for there to be so much cheap money, it should inflate the value of property once again. In other words, the ANZ Bank chief is asking for a Price Keeping Operation to be staged out of the RBA.
One imagines the hope there is that if there's so much cheap money around, surely it will get sucked into the property market and reignite those big gains in the banks' balance sheets. You have to wonder if this isn't just another vested interest mouthing off, because it sure sounds like it.
Hewson Slams Vested Interests
There's one thing about John Hewson we can all be certain about - he was Australia' Mitt Romney without the Mormonism but with Economic Rationalism as his religion instead. If nothing else he gave the Liberal Party some kind of ideological frame work from which to work, and some of it has worked out well for Australia.
It's interesting then when he pipes up and lobs a verbal grenade in the direction of the NSW government and its approval of Jamie Packer building a second casino for Sydney.
Dr Hewson said he wasn’t opposed to a hotel or a second casino license for Sydney.
However, the process had to be seen to be clean and above board, and the government shouldn’t give rise to concerns it was being compromised by vested interests.
‘‘This is sort of chipping away at the whole integrity of government process,’’ he said.
So, there's that phrase again: vested interest.
Small Arts Companies Get The Squeeze
Pleiades sent in this one as well, about how small arts companies are getting less money now that everybody is having to look for some austerity.
Exactly why these companies are called “small-to-medium”, by the way, is one of the mysteries of the sector. Most turn over less than $2 million a year, the threshold the Australian Taxation Office considers a “micro-business”. Organisations that the arts calls “medium-sized” are in fact small in any objective sense of the word. Nearly all of them are run on the proverbial smell of the oily rag, with perhaps three or four full-time administrative staff.
This diminutive scale makes many small arts companies vulnerable to the slings and arrows of artistic fortune. They have few assets and little in the way of cash reserves. If the funding disappears, most can’t survive in the long term. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Fremantle-based Deckhair Theatre wind up after 30 years of independent production, and Adelaide choreographer Leigh Warren “go freelance” to keep his dance studio afloat. Both companies have been defunded in recent years.
The problem for the small-to-medium sector is that the funding appears to be drying up. With the Australia Council getting squeezed by the federal government’s efficiency dividend, Commonwealth funding is actually falling in real terms. Nor is any extra pot of gold awaiting beneath an unexpected rainbow. Arts Minister Simon Crean appears to have conceded that he can’t get the National Cultural Policy up this year.
You feel for these arts companies. They have a tougher proposition than film producers for a start.
One of the things that the Liberal Party embraced gingerly toward the end of their time before the Ruddslide was the fact that a lot of people in the arts were small business as well; and that the conservatives' general disregard for the arts and arts funding had created a massive gulf between it and the arts community in Australia. Certainly, under most of John Howard's tenure as PM, the prevailing mood was that all arts participants were left-voting scumbag and deserved not one iota from the public purse. When you realise how many of these small arts companies are around, you wonder why and how a party in favour of small businesses could have treated them with neglect for so long.
In turn, you'd have to say that the ALP for its money has taken for granted that people in the arts are generally more socially progressive and have bred a variety of arts bureaucrats that form a crazy subculture of their own, and choke off the promise of the arts itself. You get the feeling that the ALP is a latter day Stalinist apparatus that seeks to ideologically constrain discourse through the arts by funding particular kinds of things that never makes any money.
So I guess it's not surprising they get slammed by the likes of John Roskam in the AFR:
The health of Australian democracy should not be measured by the number of students enrolled in gender studies.
In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding published in 1748, David Hume described the work of a certain species of philosopher. What he said could apply to the academics in the humanities in Australia in 2012.
“Though their speculations seem abstract, and even unintelligible to common readers, they aim at the approbation of the learned and the wise; and think themselves sufficiently compensated for the labour of their whole lives, if they can discover some hidden truths, which may contribute to the instruction of posterity.”
The pity is that the majority who teach humanities at Australian universities are a long way from discovering any hidden truths or making a contribution to the instruction of posterity.
That's a bit mean. earlier in the column is a castigation about French critics who forged a path to an unbridled kind of relativism in the late 20th Century that continues to appall moralists the world over; but that's not surprising that a conservative think tank would take offense to Derrida and Foucault. Derrida, of course being that 'Obscurantist Terror' - and there's a war going against terror to this day.
Jokes aside, the two articles give you the distinct feeling that the arts really are not valued or are important in our cultural life in Australia. More to the point, we're a nation of hardened, committed, willful, fully ideological, philistines. It's a shame the arts as a vested interest holds absolutely no sway over the conscience of this nation.
2012/10/24
An Odd Phenomenon
The Inflation That Wasn't There
I'm trying to wrap my head around how something like this can happen.
Here's the graphic from the page:
To be frank, I just don' get this. For the last decade, the Reserve Bank of Australia has been pretty rigid in insisting on sitting on the inflation rate, keeping it under 3%. To that end, they've run their interest rates up when the inflation figure hated up. During that 10year span, there were plenty of moments when they insisted the inflation rate was not so high even though cost of living figures kept coming in higher than the CPI.
So when you get to the bottom of the article you find that Taiwan has been printing its money furiously to keep their currency in line with China - to keep their labour force competitive - and somehow have experienced a price deflation.
This is really curious. The RBA didn't print money, sat on the inflation rate hard, and somehow Australia's index prices have inflated from 77 to 161. Taiwan printed money and somehow its index lowered from 62 to 52. I'm sure there's a tricky economics answer in there somewhere, but if I were to swing my Occam's Razor, I'd say the RBA has been getting their inflation figures totally wrong for a good decade and the net result is this rather nasty bit of price inflation. The article attributes the rise to the Australian Dollar, but this seems arse-about. The Australian Dollar is high because everybody else is furiously printing money and we are not.
It would also go some way toward explaining the elephant in the room, the property price bubble. Because the RBA kept reading the inflation to be much lower than it really was, it ran interest rates much lower than it should have, which resulted in too many people borrowing money to buy property, contributing to the bubble. So in that way, it can be understood that Australia did "print money" without actually printing the dollar bills. - we simply re-calibrated our property prices to being too expensive.
Which brings me to this other article today...
So Do We Re-Inflate The Bubble To Save The Government Now?
Here's Michael Pascoe saying that he thinks Wayne Swan is betting on a housing recovery.
This business of the diminishing tax revenue for the Government is pretty drastic. The ALP government is gunning for a surplus as the world economy slips back into a double dip recession, and the commodity price boom comes to a shuddering halt.
In the midst of all the financial problems of the world, Australia has somehow managed to dodge the most lethal bullets. That doesn't make us bullet proof, as the world's problems really have started to impact on our receipts. There's no telling how property prices could unravel if unemployment should go up; and nobody is saying it's going to go down. The most recent report somewhere had it that 12.5% of mortgages were in negative equity - that's 1 in 8 mortgages out there, which is no small number. 3% were in serious mortgage distress, if not defaulting. Property prices are still falling if anything - and the RBA wants it to be a slow deflation rather than a big bursting of the bubble.
So you have to wonder how on earth there can be a housing recovery if there are all these bad mortgages and distressed assets all over the place. A lot of people are going to have to swallow losses and be pushed to the wall before the sector can really improve. I don't think the RBA has the stomach for such an outcome - probably because all those bureaucrats have properties too and don't want to take the loss. You can chalk that up to being a vested interest all of its own.
I'm trying to wrap my head around how something like this can happen.
The IMF's database shows goods and services costing $US100 ($A97) to produce in the US now cost $US41 to produce in India, $US67 in China, $US105 in Germany or Britain - but $US161 in Australia.
Only Norway and Switzerland are more expensive to do business, or spend money in. Since 2002, the dollar has turned Australia from a relatively low-wage, low-cost country to a high-income, high-cost one outpacing even Japan.
Here's the graphic from the page:
To be frank, I just don' get this. For the last decade, the Reserve Bank of Australia has been pretty rigid in insisting on sitting on the inflation rate, keeping it under 3%. To that end, they've run their interest rates up when the inflation figure hated up. During that 10year span, there were plenty of moments when they insisted the inflation rate was not so high even though cost of living figures kept coming in higher than the CPI.
So when you get to the bottom of the article you find that Taiwan has been printing its money furiously to keep their currency in line with China - to keep their labour force competitive - and somehow have experienced a price deflation.
This is really curious. The RBA didn't print money, sat on the inflation rate hard, and somehow Australia's index prices have inflated from 77 to 161. Taiwan printed money and somehow its index lowered from 62 to 52. I'm sure there's a tricky economics answer in there somewhere, but if I were to swing my Occam's Razor, I'd say the RBA has been getting their inflation figures totally wrong for a good decade and the net result is this rather nasty bit of price inflation. The article attributes the rise to the Australian Dollar, but this seems arse-about. The Australian Dollar is high because everybody else is furiously printing money and we are not.
It would also go some way toward explaining the elephant in the room, the property price bubble. Because the RBA kept reading the inflation to be much lower than it really was, it ran interest rates much lower than it should have, which resulted in too many people borrowing money to buy property, contributing to the bubble. So in that way, it can be understood that Australia did "print money" without actually printing the dollar bills. - we simply re-calibrated our property prices to being too expensive.
Which brings me to this other article today...
So Do We Re-Inflate The Bubble To Save The Government Now?
Here's Michael Pascoe saying that he thinks Wayne Swan is betting on a housing recovery.
Treasury's MYEFO forecasts for the 2013-14 domestic economy make grim reading with predictions of flat or declining performances in all but two areas: dwellings investment and farm product.
It's a very brave decision, Minister, to get into the long-range weather forecasting business, but that effectively is what Treasury is doing by predicting that farm product will rise by 6 per cent in 2013-14, an upgrade from a 1 per cent rise guessed in the May budget papers.
More important for the credibility of the government's outlook is the belief that the housing industry will finally turn the corner.
Says Treasury: “Dwelling investment is forecast to be flat in 2012-13, before growing 4 per cent in 2013-14. Dwelling investment declined 3.3 per cent in 2011-12 on the back of continued weakness in the detached housing market. Conditions across the sector are expected to improve gradually over the remainder of 2012, consistent with the solid growth in dwelling approvals and commencements seen in the June quarter.
“The recovery is expected to gather momentum into 2013-14, driven by a pick-up in home buyer demand, improved affordability following declines in house prices over the past two years and the assumption that interest rates will remain below average across the forecast period.”
It's only housing and farm product and what seems a marginal improvement in net exports that hope to maintain real GDP growth at 3 per cent next year.
This business of the diminishing tax revenue for the Government is pretty drastic. The ALP government is gunning for a surplus as the world economy slips back into a double dip recession, and the commodity price boom comes to a shuddering halt.
In the midst of all the financial problems of the world, Australia has somehow managed to dodge the most lethal bullets. That doesn't make us bullet proof, as the world's problems really have started to impact on our receipts. There's no telling how property prices could unravel if unemployment should go up; and nobody is saying it's going to go down. The most recent report somewhere had it that 12.5% of mortgages were in negative equity - that's 1 in 8 mortgages out there, which is no small number. 3% were in serious mortgage distress, if not defaulting. Property prices are still falling if anything - and the RBA wants it to be a slow deflation rather than a big bursting of the bubble.
So you have to wonder how on earth there can be a housing recovery if there are all these bad mortgages and distressed assets all over the place. A lot of people are going to have to swallow losses and be pushed to the wall before the sector can really improve. I don't think the RBA has the stomach for such an outcome - probably because all those bureaucrats have properties too and don't want to take the loss. You can chalk that up to being a vested interest all of its own.
2012/10/19
Whither Oil Prices?
Not Feeling The Pinch In Australia
I just had a thought today that we haven't really felt the ups and down of crude oil prices in Australia as much as parts of last decade. I remember 2005-2008 being particularly painful for petroleum price rises, and oddly enough calls by the public to look at public transport a lot harder. Since then a few things have happened, namely, the Australian Dollar has appreciated to almost twice what it was, and the price of crude has come off the peaks. As of this writing it's siting at about US$115 /barrel, which is about 20% off the peak of US$ 145/barrel reached in 2008.
Of course during the GFC it fell down to $35/barrel, and yet the US$115 it is sitting at is above the price point that people in Australia started feeling the pinch. In short, we're being protected from this high price of oil by the high Australian Dollar. Judging from all the people driving their gas-guzzling 4WDs in Sydney, it's fair to say they're not feeling the price point of US$115 as they did in say, 2007. Also as of this writing, they're reporting record prices for gasoline in the USA.
This leaves me to ponder a) how soon will parity break for the Australian Dollar, b) how much it will go down, and then c) how soon we'll start hearing about oil prices and gasoline prices then.
At the moment, Nick Greiner and his cronies are pushing for WestConnex, a crazy tollway-driven project as part of their so-called Infrastructure NSW plan, which is mostly devoid of public transportation plans and seems to assume a great many things including the relative stability of oil prices, continuing for a long time in the future. A quick look at the crude oil prices and exchange rate tells you that this assumption is way off base, and that Nick Greiner and his vested interest cronies are asking the people of NSW to foot a massive bill to build roads that will maybe be too expensive to drive upon, and will in no way solve problems of congestion, for a future where car use may decline as a result of skyrocketing gasoline prices.
It is entirely possible that they build this crazy tollway and there won't be enough users to drive over it. It's possible this thing is going to be worse than a white elephant project.
Anyway, just some random thoughts watching the price of Brent Crude.
I just had a thought today that we haven't really felt the ups and down of crude oil prices in Australia as much as parts of last decade. I remember 2005-2008 being particularly painful for petroleum price rises, and oddly enough calls by the public to look at public transport a lot harder. Since then a few things have happened, namely, the Australian Dollar has appreciated to almost twice what it was, and the price of crude has come off the peaks. As of this writing it's siting at about US$115 /barrel, which is about 20% off the peak of US$ 145/barrel reached in 2008.
Of course during the GFC it fell down to $35/barrel, and yet the US$115 it is sitting at is above the price point that people in Australia started feeling the pinch. In short, we're being protected from this high price of oil by the high Australian Dollar. Judging from all the people driving their gas-guzzling 4WDs in Sydney, it's fair to say they're not feeling the price point of US$115 as they did in say, 2007. Also as of this writing, they're reporting record prices for gasoline in the USA.
This leaves me to ponder a) how soon will parity break for the Australian Dollar, b) how much it will go down, and then c) how soon we'll start hearing about oil prices and gasoline prices then.
At the moment, Nick Greiner and his cronies are pushing for WestConnex, a crazy tollway-driven project as part of their so-called Infrastructure NSW plan, which is mostly devoid of public transportation plans and seems to assume a great many things including the relative stability of oil prices, continuing for a long time in the future. A quick look at the crude oil prices and exchange rate tells you that this assumption is way off base, and that Nick Greiner and his vested interest cronies are asking the people of NSW to foot a massive bill to build roads that will maybe be too expensive to drive upon, and will in no way solve problems of congestion, for a future where car use may decline as a result of skyrocketing gasoline prices.
It is entirely possible that they build this crazy tollway and there won't be enough users to drive over it. It's possible this thing is going to be worse than a white elephant project.
Anyway, just some random thoughts watching the price of Brent Crude.
2012/10/15
'Garni du Jour' Again
That Ain't The Music, They're Just The Lyrics
Here's good ole David Dale, frustrated by contemporary pop music's total inability to come up with a sophisticated lyric that tickles David Dale's fancy. The headline says 'the day the music died' but really, his complaint is about the poor abstraction and bad taste in the lyrics; and really can one blame him?
Admittedly, those lyrics look pretty bad. But if the group is called 'LFMAO' then maybe it's not quite right to be expecting lyrics of any depth or meaning. Or maybe the apparent banality is implicit to the times in which we find ourselves living? In which case, should we be surprised?
Still, the whole article brought me to think about the real death of music, and I have to say it is these reality TV singing contest shows like X Factor' and 'The Voice'. For the love of god, if there is one place music is being killed, it's on these TV shows where people who have no insight into the songs they're singing are judged on rather subjective, obscure, arcane performance points while session musicians pump out 2minute abridged versions of classic songs.
No, really, they're terrible, and they have nothing to do with the qualia that makes music good. It's freaking glorified Karaoke put to the service of TV stations and advertisers, dressed up as music, with semi-pro singers fronting for the execrable business. So if David Dale really wants to take a hatchet to the death of music that he liked, well, he can have a go at these awful shows, one of which produced Adele (to whom he gives a free pass). No, Mr. Dale, it's worse than that.
Once upon a time, there was rock music, and it had a shot at being something tat could really communicate something important. Then, the cultural mainstream bought into it and the record labels sold the artists down the river, ever in the search of wider profits. And to this end it was all about packaging and looks and style; not writing and performing - As Frank Zappa called it, the 'Garni de Jour' phenomenon. You slap a piece of burnt meat between two bits of bread, and it's a burger. You add a tired piece of parsley next to it, and that's 'Garni du Jour' - and somehow this dried bit of parsley is meant to make the whole dining experience better.
Frank Zappa also made the observation that people also hate music, but love the packaging. People say they like music, but what they really like is the 'Garni du Jour'; and if the mass market is saying that the music business is crazy to focus on the segment of the market that -*gasp*- is actually interested in music being music for the sake of music.
That's how music died - when the music business decided the 'Garni du Jour' was much more important than the quality of the meat in between the bread making up the burgers they were peddling. Similarly, all these reality TV singing contest shows are all judging on the 'Garni du Jour' elements of each of these singer's 'marketability'. If they win, they can go on to sing the incredibly insightful lyrics David Dale so detests. It's not about the music, it's not even about the lyrics. Truth be told, it's all about all those *stupid* performance notes handed out by the likes of Simon Cowell and the rest of those 'judges'.
Here's good ole David Dale, frustrated by contemporary pop music's total inability to come up with a sophisticated lyric that tickles David Dale's fancy. The headline says 'the day the music died' but really, his complaint is about the poor abstraction and bad taste in the lyrics; and really can one blame him?
Australia's top-selling singles of the past 10 years (and typical lyrics)
❏ Party Rock Anthem, LMFAO (sold more than 800,000 copies): ''I'm runnin' through these hos like Drano, I got that devilish flow, no halo.''
❏ Somebody That I Used To Know, Gotye (700,000+): ''No, you didn't have to stoop so low, have your friends collect your records and then change your number.''
❏ Sexy and I Know It, LMFAO (600,000+): ''We headed to the bar, baby don't be nervous; no shoes, no shirt and I still get serviced.''
❏ Call Me Maybe, Carly Rae Jepsen (550,000+): ''You took your time with the call, I took no time with the fall; you gave me nothin' at all, but still you're in my way.''
❏ Moves Like Jagger, Maroon 5 (550,000+): ''You say I'm a kid, my ego is big; I don't give a shit and it goes like this.''
Admittedly, those lyrics look pretty bad. But if the group is called 'LFMAO' then maybe it's not quite right to be expecting lyrics of any depth or meaning. Or maybe the apparent banality is implicit to the times in which we find ourselves living? In which case, should we be surprised?
Still, the whole article brought me to think about the real death of music, and I have to say it is these reality TV singing contest shows like X Factor' and 'The Voice'. For the love of god, if there is one place music is being killed, it's on these TV shows where people who have no insight into the songs they're singing are judged on rather subjective, obscure, arcane performance points while session musicians pump out 2minute abridged versions of classic songs.
No, really, they're terrible, and they have nothing to do with the qualia that makes music good. It's freaking glorified Karaoke put to the service of TV stations and advertisers, dressed up as music, with semi-pro singers fronting for the execrable business. So if David Dale really wants to take a hatchet to the death of music that he liked, well, he can have a go at these awful shows, one of which produced Adele (to whom he gives a free pass). No, Mr. Dale, it's worse than that.
Once upon a time, there was rock music, and it had a shot at being something tat could really communicate something important. Then, the cultural mainstream bought into it and the record labels sold the artists down the river, ever in the search of wider profits. And to this end it was all about packaging and looks and style; not writing and performing - As Frank Zappa called it, the 'Garni de Jour' phenomenon. You slap a piece of burnt meat between two bits of bread, and it's a burger. You add a tired piece of parsley next to it, and that's 'Garni du Jour' - and somehow this dried bit of parsley is meant to make the whole dining experience better.
Frank Zappa also made the observation that people also hate music, but love the packaging. People say they like music, but what they really like is the 'Garni du Jour'; and if the mass market is saying that the music business is crazy to focus on the segment of the market that -*gasp*- is actually interested in music being music for the sake of music.
That's how music died - when the music business decided the 'Garni du Jour' was much more important than the quality of the meat in between the bread making up the burgers they were peddling. Similarly, all these reality TV singing contest shows are all judging on the 'Garni du Jour' elements of each of these singer's 'marketability'. If they win, they can go on to sing the incredibly insightful lyrics David Dale so detests. It's not about the music, it's not even about the lyrics. Truth be told, it's all about all those *stupid* performance notes handed out by the likes of Simon Cowell and the rest of those 'judges'.
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